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Previous Volume 348:965-966 March 6, 2003 Number 10 Next

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By Robert A. Burt. 221 pp. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002. $29.95. ISBN 0-520-23282-8.

Robert Burt has written a provocative and disturbing book that should be read by all professionals involved in end-of-life care. He suggests that dying patients, their families, and their physicians are "all vulnerable to unruly psychological forces unleashed by the imminent prospect of death" and that self-determination by patients is an inadequate safeguard against the many surrounding "forces of evil." He uses the legal and clinical examples of physician-assisted suicide, abortion, and capital punishment to illustrate his thesis. Although I disagree with some of his conclusions and examples, the central themes deserve serious consideration.

His first theme is that all . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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