Medicine and Health
Book Details

Experiments in Love and Death

Medicine, Postmodernism, Microethics and the Body

Academic Monograph

Paul Komesaroff

A fresh and evocative look at the changing world of ethics as it applies to health and illness.

Opinion

A marvellous accomplishment! This book is unquestionably among the finest written in any language about the numerous ethical issues and dimensions of our times.
- Richard M Zaner, AG Stahlman Professor Emeritus, Vanderbilt University

Paul Komesaroff moves seamlessly from vivid clinical evocation to philosophical abstraction and back again. His ethics seeks not to make life and death more manageable but rather to honour the depth and complexity of suffering.
- Arthur W Frank, Professor of Sociology, University of Calgary

This book is destined to have an incisive impact on the teaching of medical ethics.
- Alphonso Lingis, Professor of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University

“In this book, we are offered careful, detailed, sensitive accounts of a series of particular clinical encounters. The cases make interesting reading. And they have more potential to deepen our ethical understanding than does any amount of talk of maximizing good outcomes or treating others as 'rational beings'.” (B. Tobin, Internal Medicine Journal, Feb 2009)

Click link for full review: www.mup.com.au

About this Title

Experiments in Love and Death is about the depth and complexity of the ethical issues that arise in illness and medicine.

In his concept of 'microethics' Paul Komesaroff provides an alternative to the abstract debates about principles and consequences that have long dominated ethical thought. He shows how ethical decisions are everywhere: in small decisions, in facial expressions, in almost inconspicuous acts of recognition and trust.

Through powerful descriptions of case studies and clear and concise explanations of contemporary philosophical theory the book brings discussions about ethics in medicine back to where they belong-to the level of the everyday experience where people actually live, suffer and hope.

A fresh and evocative look at the changing world of ethics as it applies to health and illness, this is an important book for all those touched by illness or suffering.

About the Author

Paul Komesaroff is a physician and philosopher at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. His books include Objectivity, Science and Society, Troubled Bodies, Sexuality and Medicine (ed. with Philipa Rothfield and John Wiltshire) and Pathways to Reconciliation (ed. with Philipa Rothfield and Cleo Fleming).

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978-0-522-85566-1