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Culture of Death: The Age of “Do Harm” Medicine Paperback – May 17, 2016

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Wesley J. Smith (Author)
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4.4 out of 5 stars 28 customer reviews
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Product Details

  • Paperback: 360 pages
  • Publisher: Encounter Books; Revised ed. edition (May 17, 2016)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1594038554
  • ISBN-13: 978-1594038556
  • Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.1 x 9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #35,686 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsModern medicine at a crossroads?
By Tim Drake VINE VOICE on January 22, 2001
Format: Hardcover
In spite of the title, this book isn't about what most people would think it's about. It is not about abortion.
Rather, it is about what author Wesley J. Smith terms "futile care theory" - modern medicine's inaction due to the direction of bioethics and cost-benefit ratios.
Through compelling and often disturbing anecdotes Smith examines how "bioethicists" threaten patient welfare through redefinition, organ harvesting, and support for euthanasia.
Futile Care Theory, he explains, allows physicians to base care decisions upon the patients' "quality of life", thereby often deciding that no care is the best care.
I found Chapter 6 especially interesting, as Smith discusses how our culture protects animals at the expense of people. A similar action was taken by the National Socialist government in Germany just prior to the Nazi's creation of their "Final Solution" for the extermination of the disabled, gypsies, Jews, etc.
Smith includes an appendix which shows the payback in terms of medical discoveries and cures which have resulted from animal research.
In the end Smith advocates a "human rights" bioethics - one that will again value human life.
His work is eye-opening and demonstrates just how much we have embraced what Pope John Paul II has termed a "Culture of Death." I recommend this book quite highly.
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4.0 out of 5 starsThe Dangers of Utilitarian Thinking
By Sammy Jo on June 23, 2002
Format: Hardcover
Wesley Smith offers a chilling survey of the current state of bioethics, a field which is dominated by the utilitarian calculus. In that calculus, human beings are reduced to instruments which register pleasure and pain. The game of the calculus is to maximize the pleasure and minimize the pain. It is a game that inevitably leads us to devalue lives that are difficult.
Smith's book surveys the weaknesses of this approach to medicine as it relates to the dying and the handicapped. He traces out the slide from a justifiable desire to not artificially prolong the dying process through heroic intervention towards a world wherein doctors and bioethicists can choose to dehyrdate a dying woman against her wishes. As the economic pressures in the new world of HMO's mount, one can imagine that such scenes will only become more common.
The weakness in Smith's book is his failure to address the very hard issue of how to allocate scarce medical resources. One may rightfully deplore the spread of utilitarianism as the criteria for making these decisions, but until the humanitarian approach develops a way of measuring the trade-offs involved in medical care, the utilitarian approach cannot be dismissed entirely.
Smith points to, but does not develop, the issue of how our understanding of life and death and suffering is altered by the utilitarian calculus. Surely life is more than the sum of our pleasures and pains. The tragedy of the dominance of utilitarianism is that it leads us to place our pleasure and pain ahead of ourselves. Somehow our humanity is lost in the process.
Smith has written an important book that raises issues that can only become more urgent in the coming decades.
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5.0 out of 5 starsReasserting Human Life's Equality & Sanctity Against the Culture of Death (2016 ed)
By Cooper on June 1, 2016
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
Culture of Death is a thoroughly researched and readable work of morally charged resistance to anti-human ideas and trends now being aggressively pushed in our society. With assisted suicide becoming legalized, forced dehydration of persistently unconscious patients becoming normalized, and health care perhaps becoming rationed, the equality and sanctity of human life ethic seems on the ropes. Wesley J. Smith provides a roadmap of the ideas, events, and trends that have brought matters to this point – and which will surely continue if left unchecked.

The book presents a sharp sustained critique of the bioethics movement. It traces the sayings, writings, doings of Fletcher, Singer, Kevorkian and other well-knowns who have severally, if not jointly, injected into medical ethics the false, pernicious, and revolting idea that there are human lives unworthy of life. Prominent among supposed unworthies are infants with birth defects, persons with serious cognitive or physical disabilities, and terminally ill patients.

Thanks to Smith, the crude utilitarian ethics that characterize most bioethical thinking receives the critical scrutiny it deserves. The analysis of what Smith terms “futile care theory” – the replacement of objective medical determinations for subjective (relativist) value judgments about patient treatment – is another one of the book’s most significant contributions.

For those who read the original edition -- as this reviewer did a dozen years ago -- this 2016 edition remains entirely worth your while. For one, a new reading provides a stark reminder of the human rights dangers that need to be opposed. Also, the content is updated throughout.Read more ›
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5.0 out of 5 starsChilling but true
By Amber2416 on March 10, 2013
Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase
I am currently a fourth year medical student, and I found this book after searching on Amazon for something that would speak to the pervasive disparagement of the sanctity of life I encountered on the hospital wards. The book was particularly enlightening as to explaining the roots and teachings of bioethics that are accepted by and large without question on the part of medical providers. This book calls for a much needed larger discussion about our core values as healthcare professionals.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

1.0 out of 5 starsMisrepresentation of famous ethicist and broad sweeping generalization...

Misrepresentation of famous ethicist and broad sweeping generalization of those working in the field of bioethics. Read more

Published 5 days ago by Laura H.
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

Mind blowing information.

Published 27 days ago by Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 starsAbsolutely a must read! Had our family known a ...

Absolutely a must read! Had our family known a year ago about how the healthcare system works and the bias that exists against our most vulnerable citizens, I firmly believe we... Read more

Published 10 months ago by Cheryl J McKoy Henderson
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

This should be required reading in every school

Published 17 months ago by Lucinda
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

This one will really make you think like most of his books do.

Published 18 months ago by Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

ok

Published 22 months ago by ep
1.0 out of 5 starsSo biased

This was recommended by a friend. As a nurse -and graduate student in an Ethics course- I thought it may be a good read. Read more

Published on May 29, 2013 by Anonymous
4.0 out of 5 starsModern medical ethics

While "ethics" is a generic term for various ways of understanding and examining the moral life, the term "bioethics" is broader in scope and encompasses biological sciences,... Read more

Published on January 18, 2009 by Barbara L. Lemaster
4.0 out of 5 starstruth scarier than fiction

i heard about this author while reading a Koontz novel. am going to be enrolled in a Medical Law and Ethics course next semester. this should spark a lot of conversations... Read more

Published on October 28, 2007 by S. Jones
5.0 out of 5 starsA Revealing and Compassionate Critique of the Euthanasia Movement

Bioethicist Wesley J. Smith takes aim at the arguments permeating our culture that devalue human life. Read more

Published on June 21, 2006 by Discovery Reviewer

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