In a brilliant diagnosis of our reactions to self-improvement technologies, Carl Elliott asks questions that illuminate deep currents in the American character: Why do we feel uneasy about these drugs, procedures, and therapies even while we embrace them? Where do we draw the line between self and society? Why do we seek self-realization in ways so heavily influenced by cultural conformity?

Drawing on the work of writers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walker Percy, Paul Auster and Graham Greene, this text brings to the bioethical discussion larger philosophical questions about the sense and significance of human life. Carl Elliott explores the relationship of illness to identity, and of mental illness to spiritual illness. He also examines the treatment of children born with ambiguous genitalia, the claims of deaf culture, and the morality of self-sacrifice. This book focuses on a different sensibility in bioethics - how we use concepts, and how they relate to our own particular...

Drawing on the work of writers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walker Percy, Paul Auster and Graham Greene, this text brings to the bioethical discussion larger philosophical questions about the sense and significance of human life. Carl Elliott explores the relationship of illness to identity, and of mental illness to spiritual illness. He also examines the treatment of children born with ambiguous genitalia, the claims of deaf culture, and the morality of self-sacrifice. This book focuses on a different sensibility in bioethics - how we use concepts, and how they relate to our own particular...

Prozac and its chemical cousins, Paxil, Celexa, and Zoloft, are some of the most profitable and most widely used drugs in America. Their use in the treatment of a multitude of disorders--from generalized anxiety disorder and premenstrual syndrome to eating disorders and sexual compulsions--has provoked a whirlwind of public debate. Talk shows ask, Why is Prozac so popular? What, exactly, do these drugs treat? But sustained critical discussion among bioethicists and medical humanists has been surprisingly absent.

The eleven essays in Prozac as a Way of Life provide the...

Walker Percy brought to his novels the perspective of both a doctor and a patient. Trained as a doctor at Columbia University, he contracted tuberculosis during his internship as a pathologist at Bellevue Hospital and spent the next three years recovering, primarily in TB sanitoriums. This collection of essays explores not only Percy's connections to medicine but also the underappreciated impact his art has had--and can have--on medicine itself.
The contributors--physicians, philosophers, and literary critics--examine the relevance of Percy's work to current dilemmas in medical...

Explores issue of how we should think about postmodern bioethics and suggests that many of the questions that bioethicists pose as problematic in postmodernity are, in fact, reactions to Wittgensteinian thought-- yet bioethicists as a rule are unfamiliar

"Slow Cures and Bad Philosophers" uses insights from the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein to rethink bioethics. Although Wittgenstein produced little formal writing on ethics, this volume shows that, in fact, ethical issues permeate the entirety of his work. The scholars whom Carl Elliott has assembled in this volume pay particular attention to Wittgenstein's concern with the thick context of moral problems, his suspicion of theory, and his belief in description as the real aim of philosophy. Their aim is not to examine Wittgenstein's personal moral convictions but rather to explore how a...

Walker Percy brought to his novels the perspective of both a doctor and a patient. This collection of essays explores not only Percy's connections to medicine but also the under-appreciated impact his art has had - and can have - on medicine itself. It is suitable for those concerned with medical ethics and the human side of doctoring.