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!
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New Book Summary with Discussion Questions
August 2024
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 everything begins to change when she meets Eugénie, the 19-year-old daughter of a bourgeois family that has locked her away in the asylum. Because Eugénie has a secret: she sees spirits.
Inspired by the scandalous, banned work that all of Paris is talking about, The Book of Spirits, Eugénie is determined to escape from the asylum—and the bonds of her gender—and seek out those who will believe in her. And for that she will need Genevieve’s help .
Past Summaries
Past Summaries (PDF)
(These older summaries are available in PDF format to view or download)
- Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital
- In Shock: My Journey from Death to Recovery and the Redemptive Power of Hope by Dr Rana Awdish, 2017
- We All Fall Down by Daniel Kalla, 2019
- Hunger: A Memoir of My Body by Roxane Gay, 2017
- What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear, Beacon Press, 2018
- Every Note Played by Lisa Genova, Scout Press, 2018
- Pandora’s Lab – Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong by Paul, Blackstone Publishing, 2017
- Left Neglected by Lisa Genova, Gallery Books, 2011
- A Course in Deception by Jana Rieger, TellWell Talent, 2017
- The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, Oliver Sacks, Simon & Schuster, 1998
- Monday Mornings by Sanjay Gupta, Hachette Book Group, 2012
- The Shift by Theresa Brown, Algonquin Books, 2016
- Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, 2004
- NEXT by Michael Crichton, HarperCollins, 2006
- And Again, A Novel by Jessica Chiarella, Touchstone 2017
- Intuition by Allegra Goodman, Dial Press Trade, 2007
- The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E Pearson, Henry Holt Books, 2008
- When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, Random House, 2016
- Gailieo’s Middle Finger by Alice Dreger, Penguin Press, 2015
- Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder, Random House, 2003
- Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach, 2003
- My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult, Atria Books, 2004
- Final Exam: A Young Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality by Pauline Chen, Knopf, 2007
- Annabel by Kathleen Winter, House of Anansi Press, 2010
- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, Crown Publishers, 2010
- Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande, Metropolitan Books, 2014