Jacob M. Appel
Who Says You’re Dead?
Who Says You’re Dead? brings the most challenging and unsettling ethics controversies from contemporary science and medicine to the proverbial water cooler. Drawing upon the author’s two decades teaching medical ethics at America’s top universities and medical schools, and his work as a practicing psychiatrist, this innovative book asks readers when faced with complex unsettling scenarios, readers, What would you do? Some cases are pulled from today’s headlines, others loosely based on cases reported in professional journals. A few painstakingly disguised come from the author’s own clinical encounters. Every scenario is followed by a brief reflection of how various modern thought leaders (ethicists, philosophers, courts, political commentators, research scientists, and medical professionals) have addressed the underlying issues. In a society in which much of the public views many hot button ethical issues in stark black and white terms, the scenarios in Who Says You’re Dead? are designed to defy easy answers and to stimulate thought. It’s impossible to read just one.
Jacob M. Appel is a physician, attorney, and bioethicist who serves as an attending psychiatrist in the Mount Sinai Healthcare System. He teaches ethics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where he is Director of Ethics Education in Psychiatry and a member of the Institutional Review Board.
Appel has been a regular ethics columnist for Huffington Post and Opposing Views, and writes a monthly bioethics column for Education Update. A frequent lecturer on bioethical issues, Appel’s essays relating to bioethics have appeared in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, and many other outlets. When not engaged in bioethics, Appel writes fiction: He has published novels, short fiction collections, and prize-winning stories.