NSHEN has developed the Bioethics Book Club as a resource for ethics committees, organizations and health care teams looking for a fun, creative, interactive way to facilitate discussion about health ethics issues and engage in ethics education.

We will select a variety of books with health ethics themes – both fiction and non-fiction – and develop a handout for each that includes a summary, some of the ethics issues addressed in the book and discussion questions.

Your group will select the book that is most relevant or of interest to you, give your group members time to read the book, and then use the discussion questions as a guide to facilitate a group discussion around the health ethics issues within each book and how they relate to your practice.

Some of these books are available in the NSHEN Lending Library and most are available through Nova Scotia’s public libraries.

Continue to check back often! Also, if you know of a book not on our list that would be a good fit for Bioethics Book Club, please let us know!

Summaries / Discussion Questions

• NEW Recommendation – August 2017 – Theresa Brown’s “The Shift”

  • Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, 2004
  • NEXT by Michael Crichton, HarperCollins, 2006
  • And Again, A Novel by Jessica Chiarella, Touchstone 2017
  • Intuition by Allegra Goodman, Dial Press Trade, 2007
  • The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E Pearson, Henry Holt Books, 2008
  • When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, Random House, 2016
  • Gailieo’s Middle Finger by Alice Dreger, Penquin Press, 2015
  • Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder, Random House, 2003
  • Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach, 2003
  • My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult, Atria Books, 2004
  • Final Exam: A Young Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality by Pauline Chen, Knopf, 2007
  • Annabel by Kathleen Winter, House of Anansi Press, 2010
  • The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, Crown Publishers, 2010
  • Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande, Metropolitan Books, 2014

Coming Soon…

• Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction is Changing Men, Women, and the World by Liza Mundy, Knopf, 2007
• Handle With Care by Jodi Picoult, Atria Books, 2009
• The Ethical Canary: Science, Society and the Human Spirit by Margaret Somerville, Viking, 2000
• The Mystery of Breathing by Perri Klass, Houghton Mifflin, 2004
• The Craftsman by Richard Sennett, Yale University Press, 2009
• And The Birds Rained Down by Jocelyne Saucier, Coach House Books, 2012
• The Secret Language of Doctors by Brian Goldman, HarperCollins, 2014