I am an M.D/Ph.D. student and work as a research assistant for the director of a division of the school of medicine who is an M.D. He assigned me to research a certain topic and gave me no guidelines or guidance as to how to do it. Nevertheless, I did the research and wrote it up. My supervisor liked the report and said that he thought it was so good that “I would like to offer you the opportunity to publish it and list you as the primary author.” Some bells went off when he so grandly offered to let me author the report for which I had done 100% of research and writing. I consulted some other people in the field and they said that, as long as I was the primary author, it was legitimate for him to list himself as secondary author if he did some editing later. After editing the abstract only, he e-mailed his revisions to me and in a note at the bottom he asked me what I thought of his revised author order. His name was first, mine second, and the name of his girlfriend (who had no part in this research or its revision) was third. I was shocked by what seemed to be a case of unethical author attribution and confronted him asking why he changed the order when we had agreed that I was primary author. He said that he had put in several hours of work.

This section is meant to be a mutual effort. If you find an article you think should be abstracted in this section, do not be bashful—submit it for consideration to feature editor Kenneth V. Iserson care of CQ. If you do not like the editorial comments, this will give you an opportunity to respond in the letters section. Your input is desired and anticipated.

In situations with limited medical resources, be they personnel, equipment, or time (and it always boils down to a lack of time), clinicians use “triage” to determine which patients receive treatment. What type of treatment a patient receives depends on the triage “lottery” rules in place. Although these rules for sorting patients and distributing resources are standardized for most situations, they must be somewhat altered after overwhelming, nonstandard (i.e., biological, chemical, and radiological) disasters.

Although housed in an anonymous Victorian house in San Francisco, California, the Zen Hospice Project (ZHP) is world renowned for its pioneering model of training hospice volunteers, providing direct services to patients, and offering educational programs to the broader public.

This section is meant to be a mutual effort. If you find an article you think should be abstracted in this section, do not be bashful—submit it for consideration to feature editor Kenneth V. Iserson care of CQ. If you do not like the editorial comments, this will give you an opportunity to respond in the letters section. Your input is desired and anticipated.

Jennifer Radden's subtitle nicely summarizes the set of concerns that animate this rich and provocative book. Radden's aims are at once conceptual and normative. What degree of continuity (over time) or unity (at a time) do selves or persons really possess? And how ought healthcare professionals and others deal with individuals whose selves become “fragmented” or “divided” in various ways? Radden's analysis blends theoretical investigations in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics with key findings in abnormal psychology and psychotherapy to illuminate a nest of issues: Can we legitimately speak of one body housing or supporting more than one “person”? To what extent does our normatively charged notion of “person” presuppose a self that is integrated by continuities of memory, experience, and agency? Must legal conceptions of individual responsibility for civil or criminal wrongs be construed to require a continuous and unified “self” who is accountable? Are paternalistically motivated therapeutic interventions justifiable when dealing with dissociative-identity disorder on the grounds that they protect one “self” from another? Ought psychiatric advance directives be enforceable? What should be the normative goals of therapeutic practice with regard to individuals whose selves are fragmented?

I recently read through the most recent 24 issues of Environmental Health Perspectives—the National Institutes of Health journal of, among other issues, scientific research into how environmental contaminants impact animal and human health. It is a catalog of horrors from a public health perspective. Fish and frogs with their sex scrambled; deformed frogs with altered hormone levels in their blood; a nearly threefold increase in birth defects among Minnesota farm children exposed to pesticides; 2,4-D exposure reducing hormone levels in men; insignificant levels of four environmental chemicals adding up to a significant dose; a third study reconfirming a 50% sperm decline in U.S. men, 1934–1996; phthalates elevated in the blood of Puerto Rican girls developing breasts before they are 8; some 6,000 chemicals declared candidates for study as hormone disrupters (selected by computer from a universe of 58,000 chemicals for “most” of which we have “no biologic data”); children living near incinerators having delayed sexual development; hypospadias linked to organochlorine levels in the blood of mink, otter, and polar bears; and “No living organism may be considered DDT-free.” Nothing definitive, but it all suggests that things are tending in a direction that is perfectly awful.

Only within the past decade or so have medical ethicists, healthcare policy analysts, and politicians devoted significant time and energy to the myriad issues and problems facing the elderly. Careful consideration has revealed multiple concerns over the treatment of the elderly by families, healthcare providers, government agencies, and facility administrators and staff. One particularly troublesome area of concern involves nursing home placement and care. Dramatic stories sometimes rise to the level of national attention and scrutiny. We hear and read accounts of elder abuse by nursing home staff, indifference by nursing home administrators, disagreements over whether to initiate or withdraw a particular life-sustaining treatment, pain management protocols, physician-assisted suicide, and the issuing and honoring of DNR orders. But then these stories, as well as the ethical and policy debates they engender, are soon forgotten by the general public. Stories often not heard at all involve the everyday, mundane problems and dilemmas faced by nursing home residents. These problems include roommate selection, waiting lists, privacy surrounding grooming and sexual relations, scheduling of meals and sleeping, confidentiality of medical conditions, freedom to walk around the facility or take trips outside the facility, and use of mechanical and chemical restraints. In one sense, these issues are more problematic and more intractable than those represented in dramatic but fleeting news accounts. What is gradually becoming obvious to many is that the problems faced by the elderly in long-term care—whether these problems are remarkable or mundane, rare or frequent—deserve sustained, careful attention.

Dr. Jodi Halpern has written a remarkable book articulating a view of clinical empathy that has practical and philosophical implications for all helping professionals, as well as for normative and relational ethics within the helping professions. Dr. Halpern first carefully deconstructs a detached insight view of empathy (an intellectualist view) and empathy as sympathetic merger between two persons.

In this second edition of Death to Dust: What Happens to Dead Bodies?, emergency physician/bioethicist Kenneth Iserson has revised and expanded the original 1994 edition. The second edition improves on its predecessor in several ways. First, it updates information on several important topics, such as rates of organ donation and the number of patients awaiting organ transplantation. Second, it includes new information in a number of topic areas, such as embalming, mummification, and cryonics. Third, the design of the book, including the page layout, graphs, and illustrations, is much clearer and more attractive. The goals and organization of the second edition, however, remain unchanged from the first.

This section is meant to be a mutual effort. If you find an article you think should be abstracted in this section, do not be bashful—submit it for consideration to Kenneth V. Iserson care of CQ. If you do not like the editorial comments, this will give you an opportunity to respond in the letters section. Your input is desired and anticipated.

This section is meant to be a mutual effort. If you find an article you think should be abstracted in this section, do not be bashful—submit it for consideration to feature editor Kenneth V. Iserson care of CQ. If you do not like the editorial comments, this will give you an opportunity to respond in the letters section. Your input is desired and anticipated.