RESUME

Resume



While these new treatments often benefit patients, restoring them to well-functioning lives, they also can be employed in circumstances where they may be neither a benefit to nor wanted by patients. Where once pneumonia was the "old man's friend," the way in which "nature" ended a life that had become seriously debilitated, now the time and manner of death has been brought increasingly under human control. In coming to grips with sustaining, taking, or not prolonging life, medicine has drawn on both its own ethical traditions and society's broader ethical and religious traditions. While these new treatments often benefit ...