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     "A wide-ranging, intelligent, engaging and irreverent set of reflections on some deeply puzzling moral and cultural phenomena." - John D. Arras, Porterfield Professor of Biomedical Ethics, University of Virginia.
     "As we read Carl Elliott, we become aware of the contexts in which decisions arise: the state of medicine, the state of the nation, the state of the soul. He does not sound like other bioethicists; he sounds like Walker Percy, with a distinctive
Southern voice, at once self-assured and ruminative. That voice transforms bioethics." - Peter D. Kramer, author of Listening to Prozac and Should You Leave?...
    

 "Keeping close to the language of daily experience in a way that will remind some of Oliver Sacks, Carl Elliott shows us the ways in which medicine is losing its way at the end of the twentieth century. A Philosophical Disease is a notable blend of honest doubt and humane imagination." - Stephen Toulmin, Henry R. Luce Professor, University of Southern California.
     A groundbreaking new voice in bioethics, Carl Elliott draws on a rare combination of clinical and academic training to examine the nature of bioethics. Elliott argues for a more complicated understanding and application of bioethics, often using the fiction of such writers as Paul Auster, Kurt Vonnegut and William Styron to establish the moral complexities at stake in bioethical decision making.
     Elliott draws on his own experiences as a former medical student and as a practicing bioethicist to explore such issues as organ donation, drug treatment for depression, excusing violence in psychotic patients and treatments for ambiguously gendered children. A Philosophical Disease moves beyond the current theoretical sensibility dominating bioethics to examine some of the most important moral questions of our day.

xi Acknowledgments
xv Introduction:
Writing Morality
1 Chapter 1
Notes of a Philosophical Scut Monkey:
The Bureaucracy of Medical Ethics
25 Chapter 2
You Are What You Are Afflicted By:
Pathology, Authenticity and Identity
49 Chapter 3
Lost at the Mall; or,
The Use of Prozac in a Time of Normal Nihilism
75 Chapter 4
Puppet-Masters and Personality Disorders:
Psychopathology, Determinism and Responsibility
91 Chapter 5
Nothing Matters:
Depression and Competence in Clinical Research

103 Chapter 6
What's Wrong with Living Heart Transplantation?
121 Chapter 7
The Point of the Story:
Narrative, Meaning and Final Justification
141 Chapter 8
A General Antitheory of Bioethics
165 Notes
185 Index