Daniel Callahan---whose cofounding of The Hastings Center in 1969 was one of the most important milestones in the history of bioethics--has written on an uncommonly wide range of issues over a long career. They have moved back and forth between clinical care of individual patients and the ethical problems of health care research and delivery. Through his many writings, four core problems have recurred in all of his work, and influence each of the others. What is health and how has its understanding been shaped by medical progress and the culture of medicine and society? What is progress, a deep value in modern health care and how should we judge it? What kinds of technological innovations that come out of the drive for progress are really good for us-and what do we do when there is a clash between individual good and social good in the use of expensive technologies, a problem now evident in the unsustainable high costs of health care? How should our understanding of the place of an inevitable death in all our lives, and its place in medicine, help us to better think of the goals of medicine and the goals of our life in seeking a good death? Those four questions have been with bioethics from its beginning and will remain with it for the indefinite future. They are the roots of bioethics.

The Roots of Bioethics: Health, Progress, Technology, Death

Medical Books

Callahan, Daniel

Medicine

Oxford University Press

In recent decades, we have seen five perilous and interlocking trends dominate global discourse: irreversible climate change, extreme food and water shortages, rising chronic illnesses, and rampant obesity. Why can't we make any progress in counteracting these problems despite vast expenditures of intellectual, institutional, and social capital? What makes these global emergencies the "wicked problems" that resist our best efforts and only grow more daunting? Daniel Callahan, noted author and the nation's preeminent scholar in bioethics, examines these global problems and shines a light on the institutions, practices, and actors that block major change. We see partisan political and ideological forces, old-fashioned hucksters, and trumped-up scientific disagreements but also the problem of modern progress itself. Obesity, anthropogenic climate change, degenerative diseases, ecological degradation, and global famine are often the unintended consequences of unchecked industrial growth, insatiable eating habits, and technologically extended life spans. Only through well-crafted political, regulatory, industrial, and cultural counterstrategies can we change enough minds to check these threats. With big thinking on issues that are usually evaluated separately, this book is sure to scramble partisan divides and provoke unusual, heated debate.

The Five Horsemen of the Modern World: Climate, Food, Water, Disease, and Obesity

Politics & Social Sciences

Sociology

Columbia University Press

One of the founding fathers of bioethics describes the development of the field and his thinking on some of the crucial issues of our time. 
Daniel Callahan helped invent the field of bioethics more than forty years ago when he decided to use his training in philosophy to grapple with ethical problems in biology and medicine. Disenchanted with academic philosophy because of its analytical bent and distance from the concerns of real life, Callahan found the ethical issues raised by the rapid medical advances of the 1960s―which included the birth control pill, heart transplants, and new capacities to keep very sick people alive―to be philosophical questions with immediate real-world relevance. In this memoir, Callahan describes his part in the founding of bioethics and traces his thinking on critical issues including embryonic stem cell research, market-driven health care, and medical rationing. He identifies the major challenges facing bioethics today and ruminates on its future.
Callahan writes about founding the Hastings Center―the first bioethics research institution―with the author and psychiatrist Willard Gaylin in 1969, and recounts the challenges of running a think tank while keeping up a prolific flow of influential books and articles. Editor of the famous liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal in the 1960s, Callahan describes his now-secular approach to issues of illness and mortality. He questions the idea of endless medical “progress” and interventionist end-of-life care that seems to blur the boundary between living and dying. It is the role of bioethics, he argues, to be a loyal dissenter in the onward march of medical progress. The most important challenge for bioethics now is to help rethink the very goals of medicine.

In Search of the Good: A Life in Bioethics (Basic Bioethics)

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

The MIT Press

The idea that we have an unlimited moral imperative to pursue medical research is deeply rooted in American society and medicine. In this provocative work, Daniel Callahan exposes the ways in which such a seemingly high and humane ideal can be corrupted and distorted into a harmful practice. Medical research, with its power to attract money and political support, and its promise of cures for a wide range of medical burdens, has good and bad sides—which are often indistinguishable. In What Price Better Health?, Callahan teases out the distinctions and differences, revealing the difficulties that result when the research imperative is suffused with excessive zeal, adulterated by the profit motive, or used to justify cutting moral corners. Exploring the National Institutes of Health's annual budget, the inflated estimates of health care cost savings that result from research, the high prices charged by drug companies, the use and misuse of human subjects for medical testing, and the controversies surrounding human cloning and stem cell research, Callahan clarifies the fine line between doing good and doing harm in the name of medical progress. His work shows that medical research must be understood in light of other social and economic needs and how even the research imperative, dedicated to the highest human good, has its limits.

What Price Better Health?: Hazards of the Research Imperative (California/Milbank Books on Health and the Public)

Philosophy

University of California Press

The idea that we have an unlimited moral imperative to pursue medical research is deeply rooted in American society and medicine. In this provocative work, Daniel Callahan exposes the ways in which such a seemingly high and humane ideal can be corrupted and distorted into a harmful practice. Medical research, with its power to attract money and political support, and its promise of cures for a wide range of medical burdens, has good and bad sides―which are often indistinguishable. In What Price Better Health?, Callahan teases out the distinctions and differences, revealing the difficulties that result when the research imperative is suffused with excessive zeal, adulterated by the profit motive, or used to justify cutting moral corners. Exploring the National Institutes of Health's annual budget, the inflated estimates of health care cost savings that result from research, the high prices charged by drug companies, the use and misuse of human subjects for medical testing, and the controversies surrounding human cloning and stem cell research, Callahan clarifies the fine line between doing good and doing harm in the name of medical progress. His work shows that medical research must be understood in light of other social and economic needs and how even the research imperative, dedicated to the highest human good, has its limits.

What Price Better Health?: Hazards of the Research Imperative (Volume 9) (California/Milbank Books on Health and the Public)

Health, Fitness & Dieting

A provocative call to rethink America's values in health care.

Setting Limits: Medical Goals in an Aging Society

Administration & Medicine Economics

Simon & Schuster Books

Examines the problems of providing and paying for health care for the increasing number of elderly Americans and offers controversial solutions to these problems

Touchstone Books

Callahan (director, the Hastings Center) asks the right questions (e.g. how much and what kind of health is necessary for a decent life?) and offers thoughtful answers: America's obsession with open-ended medical progress distorts the meaning of good health; prolonging life beyond reasonable expectations causes the neglect of general healthcare, and shortchanges other crucial needs such as education and housing. Persuasive. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

What Kind of Life

Simon&Schuster

Examines the subjects of medical ethics and mortality and encourages a better understanding of the place of death in nature and its meaning to humans

The Troubled Dream of Life: Living With Mortality

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Callahan, Daniel. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Callahan, Daniel

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Callahan, Daniel. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Roots of Bioethics: Health, Progress, Technology, Death

The Five Horsemen of the Modern World: Climate, Food, Water, Disease, and Obesity

The Five Horsemen of the Modern World: Climate, Food, Water, Disease, and Obesity

In Search of the Good: A Life in Bioethics (Basic Bioethics)

What Price Better Health?: Hazards of the Research Imperative (California/Milbank Books on Health and the Public)

What Price Better Health?: Hazards of the Research Imperative (Volume 9) (California/Milbank Books on Health and the Public)

Setting Limits: Medical Goals in an Aging Society

Setting Limits: Medical Goals in an Aging Society

What Kind of Life

The Troubled Dream of Life: Living With Mortality