Book Review
The Moral Physician
Practicing Medicine and Ethics: Integrating Wisdom, Conscience, and Goals of Care
by Lauris Christopher Kaldjian
Cambridge University Press, 2014
(304 pages, $90.00, hardcover)
reviewed by Christopher Tollefsen
Lauris Kaldjian, a practicing physician and director of the Program in Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Iowa, has written a book of crucial importance to health care practitioners concerned with the protection of conscience as well as the protection of patients. The conjoined emphasis is important: increasingly, the assertion of patient autonomy is viewed as a trump against physician conscience. Where physicians have moral objections to patient requests, those objections, it is said, should be considered private. Thus, the medical profession effects the same separation characteristic of political liberalism: that between public and private reason and reasons.
THIS ARTICLE ONLY AVAILABLE TO SUBSCRIBERS.
FOR QUICK ACCESS:
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door with Full Online Access
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
- Six print issues per year
- Full digital archive access
Subscribe (Print + Online)
Get six issues (one year) of Touchstone PLUS full online access including pdf downloads for only $39.95.
Subscribe (Online Only)
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more on medicine from the online archives
33.3—May/June 2020
on the Wisdom of the Good Doctor Edmund Pellegrino by Allen H. Roberts II
more from the online archives
31.1—January/February 2018
on Ragnarök, an Extreme Weather Event & the Paths to Conversion by Timothy J. Burbery
30.2—March/April 2017
The Education of Children Takes Generations of Fidelity by W. Ross Blackburn
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
