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!
New Book Summary with Discussion Questions
February 2023
Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital
Amsterdam, this intensely involving memoir from a Medical Director of Bellevue Hospital looks poignantly at patients’ lives and highlights the complex mind-body connection.
Using the plights of twelve very different patients–from dignitaries at the nearby UN, to supermax prisoners at Riker’s Island, to illegal immigrants, and Wall Street tycoons–Dr. Eric Manheimer “offers far more than remarkable medical dramas: he blends each patient’s personal experiences with their social implications” (Publishers Weekly).
Manheimer is not only the medical director of the country’s oldest public hospital, but he is also a patient. As the book unfolds, the narrator is diagnosed with cancer, and he is forced to wrestle with the end of his own life even as he struggles to save the lives of others.
Past Summaries
- In Shock: My Journey from Death to Recovery and the Redemptive Power of Hope by Dr Rana Awdish, 2017
- We All Fall Down by Daniel Kalla, 2019
- Hunger: A Memoir of My Body by Roxane Gay, 2017
- What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear, Beacon Press, 2018
- Every Note Played by Lisa Genova, Scout Press, 2018
- Pandora’s Lab – Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong by Paul , Blackstone Publishing, 2017
- Left Neglected by Lisa Genova, Gallery Books, 2011
- A Course in Deception by Jana Rieger, TellWell Talent, 2017
- The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, Oliver Sacks, Simon & Schuster, 1998
- Monday Mornings by Sanjay Gupta, Hachette Book Group, 2012
- The Shift by Theresa Brown, Algonquin Books, 2016
- 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…
- Lying Down in the Ever Falling Snow