title: Construction and practice of medical responsibility: dilemmas and narratives from geriatrics.
abstract: A narrative approach is employed in this article about dilemmas and physician reasoning in geriatric medicine in order to explore the moral-medical worlds of urban American physicians. Reconstructed dilemmas, in the form of stories told by 51 doctors, are analyzed as cultural documents of both clinical-moral knowledge and practice and the physician as moral actor. Discussion focuses on ways in which responsibility is constituted and enacted through a particular language of clinical action. This analysis opens the subject of bioethics to a range of infrequently discussed issues that physicians cite as deeply troubling and contributes to a broadening of anthropological approaches useful in the study of bioethics.
authors.affiliation: Dept. of Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of California, San Francisco 94143, USA.
authors.forename: S R
authors.initials: SR
authors.lastname: Kaufman
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D001675:Bioethics; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D004992:Ethics, Medical; D005260:Female; D005853:Geriatrics; D006801:Humans; D008020:Life Support Care; D008297:Male; D016743:Mental Competency; D009014:Morals; D009657:North Carolina; D010348:Patient Care Team; D010819:Physician's Role; D010820:Physicians / Q000523:psychology; D012297:Right to Die; D012941:Social Responsibility