NSHEN has developed the Bioethics Book Club as a resource for ethics committees, organizations and healthcare teams looking for a fun, creative, interactive way to facilitate discussion about health ethics issues and engage in ethics education.

We will select a variety of books with health ethics themes – both fiction and non-fiction – and develop a handout for each that includes a summary, some of the ethics issues addressed in the book and discussion questions.

Your group will select the book that is most relevant or of interest to you, give your group members time to read the book, and then use the discussion questions as a guide to facilitate a group discussion around the health ethics issues within each book and how they relate to your practice.

Some of these books are available in the NSHEN Lending Library and most are available through Nova Scotia’s public libraries.

Continue to check back often! Also, if you know of a book not on our list that would be a good fit for Bioethics Book Club, please let us know!

  • New Book Summary with Discussion Questions

    March 2025

    The Brill Pill

    In the not-so-distant future, the highly ambitious scientist, William Dalal, is working on improving lives of people using brain regeneration. However, personal tragedy and a rivalry between Will and another scientist causes Will to lose his moral compass. Driven by his ambition to help people become smarter and more successful, Will decides to take matters in his own hands and carry out his research experiments in unconventional ways. For every success, however, there is a consequence, and Will starts to question whether it is all worth it.

    Download

Past Summaries

  • The Mad Women’s Ball

    Genevieve is a senior nurse. After the childhood death of her sister Blandine, she shunned religion and placed her faith in both the celebrated psychiatrist Dr. Charcot and science. But… View Summary

Past Summaries (PDF)

(These older summaries are available in PDF format to view or download)