All ethics has a religious dimension. This paper considers how specific Christian insights concerning death, suffering, human nature and human creatureliness can help to expose more fully the moral issues at stake in some of the dilemmas faced by doctors. It ends by acknowledging the crushing burden of decision-making which rests on many in the medical profession, and indicates the importance of religious resources in dealing with this.

"What do natural behaviour, natural landscapes, natural yoghurt and natural theology have in common? This wide-ranging study of the origins and use of the concept of nature aims to throw light on many of today's controversial issues - from sexuality and designer babies to GM foods." "John Habgood explores some of the meanings of the complex word nature in ancient classical thought, and the development of these in the context of the natural sciences, environmentalism, ethics, genetics and theology. The Concept (...) of Nature examines practical questions such as whether there are laws of nature which can lead us to describe some human behaviours as natural and others as unnatural, and seeks to guide Christian thinking by indentifying God as the source both of nature's givenness and of its immense potential for change."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

The paper analyses the factors involved in a series of decisions by the Newcastle Area Health Authority concerning the future of one of its hospitals, as an illustration of the way in which choices about priorities in the health service are actually made. There is no easy way to resolve the various conflicts of interest, notably in this case the competing demands of acute and chronic medicine. Difficult decisions are made more difficult, however, by the over-rigid division of medicine into (...) compartments, by mistrust between the medical profession and administrators, and by the inordinately long time-scale of the decision-making process. It is suggested that there might be value in acknowledging explicitly that occasional examples of 'heroic medicine' must not be allowed too much influence in shaping public expectations. The paper results from the deliberations of a working group on current medical-ethical problems, set up under the auspices of the Northern Regional Health Authority (I). (shrink)