Up in the Air — Suspending Ethical Medical Practice

Abstract

First I will define what I conceive medicine to be. In general terms, it is to do away with the sufferings of the sick, to lessen the violence of their diseases, and to refuse to treat those who are overmastered by their disease, realizing that in such cases medicine is powerless. — The Hippocratic Corpus Our plane was flying from the East Coast to the West carrying 167 passengers, including my wife, a hospitalist and internist, and me, a neurologist and clinical ethicist. About midflight, a woman in the row behind us reached frantically for the baggage bin over our . . .