Description Mohrmann spent 30 years as a pediatrician treating sick and dying children, and this collection of stories about her most memorable cases is yet another important contribution to the narrative bioethics genre.
These are stories that are both painful and hopeful, tragic and funny, full of remarkable characters and sometimes bizarre families.
In some ways the book closely resembles Zaner's Conversations on the Edge, in that it allows the reader to peek behind the hospital room curtain to see how patients and their families deal with agonizing choices about life and death.
And in both books the reader can see the author evolve and grow over the course of a career.
But in the case of Mohrmann's work the author is not simply listening to and advising patients and loved ones, but actually treating them--and, in some cases, making the hard call to recognize the end and withdraw life support Further, Mohrmann's ultimate intention is to tell, through these cases, how doctors learn to be doctors--that is, how physicians learn to attend to patients.
Listening, accompanying, and waiting--these are the primary learnings in the education of a doctor.
So while this is a book in bioethics, and Mohrmann is an established figure in the SCE crowd, it will also appeal to physicians and other health care workers.
Hardback edition reviewed positively in New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, elsewhere.
About the author Margaret E.
Mohrmann, MD, is associate professor of religious studies and medical education at the University of Virginia and is the author of Medicine as Ministry: Reflections on Suffering, Ethics, and Hope.
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Georgetown University Press Attending children: a doctor's education, paperback/margaret e. mohrmann
