Two dreams

Two disputes are waged simultaneously in the pages of this issue of the Report, but it might be easy to lose track of the second. The obvious dispute is about resource allocation in health policy: the question is whether limited health care resources should be spent on identified victims—people whose struggles with disease have made the news—when the same investment might provide more help if spent on a larger number of unknown, merely “statistical” people. The second, less easily noticed dispute is about the challenge of crafting public policy when the arguments pro and con are not decisive.     

Two Theories of Modernity

Modernity is not that form of life toward which all cultures converge as they discard beliefs that held our forefathers back. Rather, it is a movement from one constellation of background understandings to another, which repositions the self in relation to others and the good.     

Two Pahlavi chapters on medicine

The medical sciences in Sasanian society, in late Antiquity, constitute a rather neglected field of inquiry. Our most reliable sources for the study of this particular period in the history of science include a number of texts that were written in several older Iranian languages. In the following pages, we offer translations and commentaries on two such texts, written in Middle Persian, dealing with the life sciences. The topics discussed include copulation, pregnancies in various species, lactation, and moral and physical characteristics in the offspring. Placed in juxtaposition, the two texts, furthermore, clarify some of the obscure points in each of them. It is hoped that this preliminary study will help to sketch the path for future studies of the field.     

Two craniotomy arguments don't make it

Craniotomy as a surgical procedure used in the delivery of a fetus is subject to various moral judgments, some positive and some negative. This article gives consideration to two arguments offered for the moral legitimacy of the craniotomy. Each argument is closely examined and each is found to be flawed and hence inconclusive.     

The Remmelink Study: Two Years Later

The Remmelink Committee published its report on medical decisions at the end of life in the Netherlands in September 1991. As a result, the Dutch debate about physician aid-in-dying has been broadened to include life-terminating acts that have not been explicitly requested by the patient.     

When Technology Alters Nature,Two Kinds of Responsibility

Book reviewed in this article: The Imperative of Responsibility. In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age . By Hans Jonas.