HOME
Category: Book Review
July 01, 2012
After losing his sister Karen in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack in New York, a devastated brother helps to organise her memorial service and packs up all her possessions. What happens to him over the next few weeks has culminated in the form of the book under review.
July 01, 2012
Ever since the first organ transplant was successfully performed in the 1950s, controversies surrounding the scope and consequences of this medical intervention have attracted more attention than its potential human benefit. While the medical world finds in it the potential to provide effective t...
July 01, 2012
Gandhiji penned Hind Swaraj on board a ship in 1909, and its continuing and universal relevance has been reaffirmed even today. Dr. Ulhas Jajoo's book is an encore of Hind Swaraj. The book is charged with core truths, applicable anywhere, for anybody, with no need for any financial largesse. The ...
October 01, 2008
The back cover shows Dr Gawande in his surgical scrubs, mask lowered to his neck and bleeper attached to his belt. He looks at you through thin-rimmed glasses, hands clasped together. One wonders whether there is the faintest trace of a smile on his face.
July 01, 2008
The volume under review, edited by James V Lavery of the Department of Public Health Sciences and the Joint Center for Bioethics, University of Toronto, Canada, and colleagues is a welcome addition in this era of global health in which boundaries, including those surrounding the sites of clini...
July 01, 2008
It feels odd reviewing a book that was published three years ago (and noted in IJME two years ago). Why is it worthwhile reviewing so long after publication a dryly written sociological monograph built around a case study of risk determination processes in early 20th-century clinical trials of po...
April 01, 2008
Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) are created for the "express purpose of providing safety to participants in clinical trials" and "IRBs exist for the sole formality of passing protocols so that drug companies can get legal clearance to start their clinical trials" are two statements that I have...
January 01, 2008
Primum non nocere, the Hippocratic dictum, is perhaps the cardinal rule of medicine in general and of medical ethics in particular. This principle has been honoured by most of its practitioners in the long history of medicine. Thus, a book which provides a revisionist history and bunks considerab...
October 01, 2007
"This is a book about prion diseases - what they are, what causes them, who they afflict, how we might cure them and how we found out what we know about them." This bland statement on page xxv of the introduction gives no clue to the unique manner in which Mr D T Max narrates an account that had ...
July 01, 2007
This book is the product of three months of participant-observation research in a dialysis and renal transplant unit in Karachi which conducts only genetically matched transplants. The author, a surgeon who went on to study bioethics, “sought to understand how donors, recipients, their fami...