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Ethical Issues in Neurology, 2nd ed.
by James L. Bernat,
508 pp., Boston, Butterworth-Heinemann, 2002, $75
Book reviews are customarily about product, not process, but the way Jim Bernat created his valuable ethics text tells a lot about the book: he started writing at his office desk at about 5:00 each morning, worked until it was time to go on rounds, read many hundreds of references that had entered the literature since the first edition appeared in 1994, used endnotes to comment on them without overloading the text, and delivered the completed manuscript to his publisher well ahead of schedule.
Aristotle asserted that “when there is an end beyond the action, the product is by nature better than the activity.”1 Even if I were confident that I understood the philosopher’s claim well enough to accept it, I would still place a high value on Bernat’s method of going about his work. Diligence alone is not enough to make a good book, but Bernat had a great deal to say; realized that the only way to say it clearly, succinctly, and without unintended repetition was to say it all himself; and got the job done.
The text is patient but not pedestrian. Like the writing of the late Stephen Jay Gould, Bernat’s is pithy and uncondescending, but it does not have the juice squeezed out of it. He is “always human” when he talks.
When Bernat wrote the first edition of his book, he had already established himself as a leader in the field of clinical ethics. He chaired the American Academy of Neurology’s ethics subcommittee. It is now the Ethics, Law, and Humanities Committee, on which he continues to serve.
I had the honor to review that first edition. My review suggested that “there is little lost, in terms …
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