There is both a timeliness and a transcendent 'rightness' in the fact that scholars, clinicians, and health professionals are beginning to examine the ethics-based components of decision making in health care of the elderly. Ethics - as the discipline concerned with right or wrong conduct and moral duty - pervades hospital rooms, nursing home corridors, physicians' offices, and the halls of Congress as decisions are made that concern the allocation of health-related services to individuals and groups in need. In particular, care of older persons recently has received dispropor tionate...

in a scientific way, and takes the patient and his family into his confidence. Thus he learns something from the sufferer, and at the same time instructs the invalid to the best of his power. He does not give his prescriptions until he has won the patient's support, and when he has done so, he steadilY aims at producing complete restoration to health by persuading the sufferer in to compliance (Laws 4. 720 b-e, [28]). This passage shows the perennial nature of the problems of treating the patient as a person. It shows as well the historical'depth of philosophical interest in medicine. The...

This volume, which has developed from the Fourteenth Trans Disciplinary Symposium on Philosophy and Medicine, September 5-8, 1982, at Tel Aviv University, Israel, contains the contributions of a group of distinguished scholars who together examine the ethical issues raised by the advance of biomedical science and technology. We are, of course, still at the beginning of a revolution in our understanding of human biology; scientific medicine and clinical research are scarcely one hundred years old. Both the sciences and the technology of medicine until ten or fifteen years ago had the feeling...