“”An excellent and comprehensive introductory volume on this topic, covering a variety of issues including professionalism in the patient-physician relationship, abortion, care of critically ill newborns, reproductive technology, embryonic stem cell research, genomic technologies, treatment at the end of life, and health care reform. There is a particularly useful introductory chapter about understanding ethics and approaches to ethical decisions. The authors provide a framework where ethics sits between being and doing, in other words who we ought to become as a person and how we ought to act in relation to others. This involves goals, virtues, principles and circumstances. Among the requirements for ethics are freedom and knowledge, reasoning and discernment, and a normative basis on which to judge the issues. This framework is then applied to health care ethics at three levels: macro health policy issues, middle organizational issues and micro clinical issues. Different types of ethical theories are also explained—virtue theories, deontological theories relating to action, and consequentialist theories. The discussions are very well illustrated with a variety of case histories.””