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A Father, a Son, and the Evolution of Medical Ethics
Beacon Press
May 2014
On Sale: May 13, 2014
240 pages
ISBN: 0807033405
EAN: 9780807033401
Kindle: B00GQA28MG
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Memoir
The story of two doctors, a father and son, who practiced
in very different times and the evolution of the ethics that
profoundly influence health care As a practicing physician and longtime member of his
hospital's ethics committee, Dr. Barron Lerner thought he
had heard it all. But in the mid-1990s, his father, an
infectious diseases physician, told him a stunning story: he
had physically placed his body over an end-stage patient who
had stopped breathing, preventing his colleagues from
performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation, even though CPR
was the ethically and legally accepted thing to do. Over the
next few years, the senior Dr. Lerner tried to speed the
deaths of his seriously ill mother and mother-in-law to
spare them further suffering. These stories angered and alarmed the younger Dr.
Lerner—an internist, historian of medicine, and
bioethicist—who had rejected physician-based
paternalism in favor of informed consent and patient
autonomy. The Good Doctor is a fascinating and moving
account of how Dr. Lerner came to terms with two very
different images of his father: a revered clinician,
teacher, and researcher who always put his patients first,
but also a physician willing to "play God," opposing the
very revolution in patients' rights that his son was
studying and teaching to his own medical students. But the elder Dr. Lerner's journals, which he had kept for
decades, showed the son how the father's outdated
paternalism had grown out of a fierce devotion to
patient-centered medicine, which was rapidly disappearing.
And they raised questions: Are paternalistic doctors just
relics, or should their expertise be used to overrule
patients and families that make ill-advised choices? Does
the growing use of personalized medicine—in which
specific interventions may be best for specific
patients—change the calculus between autonomy and
paternalism? And how can we best use technologies that were
invented to save lives but now too often prolong death? In
an era of high-technology medicine, spiraling costs, and
health-care reform, these questions could not be more relevant. As his father slowly died of Parkinson's disease, Barron
Lerner faced these questions both personally and
professionally. He found himself being pulled into his dad's
medical care, even though he had criticized his father for
making medical decisions for his relatives. Did playing
God—at least in some situations—actually make
sense? Did doctors sometimes "know best"? A timely and compelling story of one family's engagement
with medicine over the last half century, The Good
Doctor is an important book for those who treat
illness—and those who struggle to overcome it.
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