Hardback: Traci had the best room in the hospital, one that overlooked a stunning green lawn and a shimmering oval pond. She was young and vibrant. But she also had a terrible disease. Her leukemia had not responded to treatment, and how her doctor wanted her to try another round of chemotherapy. This time, though, the odds of success were minimal. Should she grasp at the straw offered or reject it, because of the burden more treatment would place on her husband and their two small children?
Whose decision was it anyway?
In The Woman Who Decided to Die (2009), novelist and bioethicist Ronald Munson takes readers to the very edges of medicine, where treatments fail and where people must cope with helplessness, mortality, dread and doubt.
Using dramatic personal narratives that place us shoulder to shoulder with doctors, patients, and caregivers as they wrestle with uncertainty and struggle to make decisions, Munson explores ten riveting case-based stories, told with a writer's eye for illuminating detail.
Munson suggests that the axiom "With great power comes great responsibility" is more than a slogan for a superhero. Rather, it could be adopted as the basic rule guiding decision making in contemporary medicine.
The time when doctors were forced to stand helpless at bedside and let nature takes its cruelest course is long past.
Advances in technology have multiplied the powers of medicine so extensively that they force us to struggle with new and often gut-wrenching decisions.
How do we know when someone is dead and not just in a coma?
Should a child be removed from a respirator?
When is a patient not competent to make a decision?
Can parents donate the organs of their deceased adult daughter?
The cases Munson presents include a convicted felon who needs a new heart, a student who believes she is being controlled by invisible Agents, a stepfather asked to give a lobe of his liver to his stepson, and a psychiatrist-patient who prizes his autonomy until the end.
Raising fundamental questions about human relationships, this is an essential book about the very nature of life and death.
About the author: Ronald Munson is a nationally acclaimed bioethicist who has worked with the National Institutes of Health (Eye and Cancer). He is also a member of the Washington University School of Medicine's Human Research Protection Committee and an Associate Editor for ethics at the American Journal of Surgery.
Educated at Columbia (PhD) and Harvard (Postdoctoral Fellow), he is Professor of the Philosophy of Science and Medicine at the University of Missouri-St Louis. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of California-San Diego, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School.
His books include the award-winning Raising the Dead: Organ Transplants, Ethics and Society (2002) - named a "Best Book in Science and Medicine" by the American Library Association, Reasoning in Medicine (1998) with Daniel Albert and Michael Resnick and Intervention and Reflection: Basic Issues in Medical Ethics (1983) - in print for thirty years and is the most widely used bioethics text in the United States.
Munson is also the author of the novels Nothing Human (1991), Fan Mail (1993) and Night Vision (1995).
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