The Ethics of Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah (Princeton University Press, 384 pages, $29.95) Many of us, when we pause to reflect on the larger questions, tend to think of our lives as vast projects that we are responsible for planning, organizing, and living out to completion. We often think, in fact, that a […]
Carl Elliott
Carl Elliott is an associate professor at the University of Minnesota Center for Bioethics and the author of Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream.
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Can’t Swallow It Anymore
On the Take: How Medicine’s Complicity With Big Business Can Endanger Your Health By Jerome P. Kassirer • Oxford University Press • 288 pages • $28.00 The $800 Million Pill: The Truth Behind the Cost of New Drugs By Merrill Goozner • University of California Press • 297 pages • $24.95 Powerful Medicines: […]
Posted inFeatures
Forever Young
Rapture: How Biotech Became the New Religion By Brian Alexander, Basic Books, 289 pages, $25.95 Merchants of Immortality: Chasing the Dream of Human Life Extension By Stephen S. Hall, Houghton Mifflin, 439 pages, $25.00 To see what happens when market forces meet wishful thinking, just have a look at the history of anti-aging medicine. In […]
Posted inEducation in America
Pill Pushovers
The Big Fix: How the Pharmaceutical Industry Rips Off American Consumers by Katherine Greider, Public Affairs, 189 pages, $14.00 A couple of months ago, I was invited to give a presentation for the psychiatry department at another medical school. The topic was medical ethics, and I was planning to talk especially about the growing influence […]
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Logical Extreme
Press Release ABC Entertainment If you liked Extreme Makeover, you’ll love Extreme Psychiatry, the hot new “reality” show premiering Thursday night at 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (7 Central and Mountain). Join our contestants as they begin their voyage of self-transformation with the aid of psychotherapy, involuntary confinement and heavy psychoactive medication. Here’s a look […]
Posted inFeatures
American Bioscience Meets the American Dream
“Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.” When Jacques Barzun made this famous diagnosis of American life in 1954, Wallace Laboratories was preparing to introduce the nation to a new drug called Miltown. Marketed as a “tranquilizer,” Miltown was the first prescription drug developed specifically for the anxiety […]
Posted inFeatures
The Parenting Trap
Raising America: Experts, Parents and a Century of Advice About Children By Ann Hulbert, Alfred A. Knopf, 384 pages, $27.50 We live in an age of experts. Our newspapers and magazines are filled with advice columns, our best-seller lists with diet manuals and self-help books. We rely on experts to manage our births, plan our […]