Support First Things by turning your adblocker off or by making a  donation. Thanks!
MENU
Donate to First Things

  1. Medicine

Letter to an Aspiring Doctor

You tell me you are thinking, my dear Stephen, of medicine as a career, but you wonder whether you have the ability or the temperament for it. You say that you have wanted to be a doctor ever since your family practitioner visited you at home as a child when you had severe tonsillitis. He seemed a . . . . Continue Reading »

Card-Carrying Precadavers

It has been almost twenty years since I dissected a dead human body. It still seems strange: My first encounter with a human body to learn the art of healing was an encounter with a corpse. What is more, I took this body to pieces. In any other context, this act would have been a felony. Respect for . . . . Continue Reading »

Healing the Dying

At our annual reunions, my brother and sisters and I often joked that we flew home every year because “this might be Grandpa’s last.” We wanted to be sure to say one final goodbye. The odd thing was, we had been saying this for twenty years. Grandpa just didn’t seem to die. And as the clock . . . . Continue Reading »

The Terminators

Canada’s pending legislation on euthanasia and assisted suicide raises a question: What shall we call people who are legally involved in the destruction of human life—particularly those who do the actual killing? Shall we call them medical executioners? They are indeed executioners, as none can . . . . Continue Reading »

Slick and Far From Truth

Given the low standards of mainstream reporting on religious issues, it’s hard to publish an article that is truly disappointing, but Slate’s recent piece “Sick and Far From Home” manages to achieve just that. The article, which a Slate press release trumpeted as “a stunning investigatory . . . . Continue Reading »

Planned Parenthood Is a Racket

It would happen the same way every time.A few tough-looking guys would show up on the doorstep of a new business. They came offering “protection services” for a certain fee as a most generous favor to the owner. These services were necessary, it would be explained, because this was a “bad . . . . Continue Reading »

Doctors and Abortion

Nearly thirty years ago, I published a book, Abortion and the Private Practice of Medicine, in which I sought to understand what then was already emerging as the settled pattern of access to abortion services around the country. By the 1980s, the present pattern in which abortions are performed in specialized clinics rather than in hospitals or doctors’ offices had been established. Several writers in that decade, the sociologist Kristin Luker and the anthropologist Faye Ginsburg among them, described the politics of abortion clearly dependent on how physicians were delivering those services. Continue Reading »

Featured Authors

    Filter Tag Articles

    2024 First Things. All rights reserved.
    View our privacy policy here.
    212.627.1985 ft@firstthings.com