Saints, Please Come Marching In

When the saints go marching on.

Having worked as a specialty doctor in palliative care for the past 6 years and now returning to general practice, I have become increasingly uncertain as to the future role of in-patient hospices. Perhaps the time has come for a realistic look at where exactly they fit in to the bigger picture of end-of-life care. Of particular concern is whether their existence inhibits the development of oth...

Moral Monsters and Saints

This paper argues for the moral significance of the notion of an evil person or character. First, I argue that accounts of evil character ought to support a robust bad/evil distinction; yet existing theories cannot plausibly do so. Consequentialist and related theories also fail to account for some crucial properties of evil persons. Second, I sketch an intuitively plausible “affective-motivati...

The saints of epilepsy.

E PILEPSY, at least in its grand mal variety, presents so dramatic and, to the lay observer, so terrifying a spectacle that it is not strange that its victims readily resorted to supernatural aid for alleviation. Unlike so many other diseases it offers no external signs of its presence and the horrifying suddenness with which apparently healthy and normal people could be transformed into writhi...

The saints among the Saints: a study of curanderismo in Utah.

Saviors as saints or sinners?

Advances in medical science are frequently characterized by two related phenomena. First, they create the opportunity for individuals to make choices previously unavailable and thereby pose new moral questions that challenge both our moral intuitions and social institutions. Second, innovation in healthcare unfolds, both in the sense that its utilization spreads geographically but also that it ...