Contents

Members of The President's Council on Bioethics

Council Staff and Consultants                  

Illustrations

Leon R. Kass, Chairman, Introduction

Acknowledgments

Section I:
Natural Imperfection and Human Longing

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Birth-mark

Ovid, Metamorphoses

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty

Lewis Thomas, The Wonderful Mistake

Andrew M. Niccol, Gattaca

C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength

Richard Selzer, Imelda

Stephen Braun, The Science of Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Mood

Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans

René Descartes, Discourse on Method

E. O. Wilson, Naturalist

Richard P. Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman

James D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account
of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA

The Hippocratic Oath

The Book of Sirach

Albert Camus, The Plague

Richard Selzer, The Surgeon as Priest

W. H. Auden, The Art of Healing (In Memoriam
David Protech, M.D.)

Walt Whitman, To One Shortly to Die

Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (Death of the Frau Consul)

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Perri Klass, Invasions

Section II:
The Human Being and the Life Cycle

Galway Kinnell, The Fly

Plato, The Symposium

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, What the Body Knows

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (Cannon Fodder and The
Operating Tent)

St. Augustine, Confessions

Walt Whitman, I Sing the Body Electric

Delmore Schwartz, The Heavy Bear

Vladimir Bukovsky,Account of Torture

Roger Angell, Late Innings

John Ciardi, Washing Your Feet

Richard Selzer, Whither Thou Goest

Thomas Lynch, Good Grief: An Undertaker's Reflections

The Rhetoric of Aristotle

Francis Bacon, Of Youth and Age

William Shakespeare, As You Like It

J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (The Young Nicholas)

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (The Mature Nicholas)

Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (Thomas Buddenbrooks)

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (The Countess Rostóva)

Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

Robert Louis Stevenson, Ordered South

Willa Cather, The Professor's House

Liam O'Flaherty, Life

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (Childbirth)

George Eliot, Silas Marner

Galway Kinnell, After Making Love We Hear Footsteps

Geoffrey Wolff, The Duke of Deception

Sigrid Undset, The Mistress of Husaby

The Iliad of Homer (Meeting of Glaukos and Diomedes and Meeting of Hektor and Andromache)

The Odyssey of Homer (Odysseus and Kalypso)

The Book of Revelation, 21:1-22:5

Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, Book III

Francis Bacon, Of Death

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Moral Epistles: On Meeting
Death Cheerfully

The Epic of Gilgamesh

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels

Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting

e. e. cummings, Two Poems

Hans Jonas, The Burden and Blessing of Mortality

Mark Twain, The Autobiography of Mark Twain

Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill and Do Not Go Gentle into
That Good Night

Murasaki Shikibu, Sôku, and Dogen, Three Japanese Poems

William Shakespeare,Sonnet 12

Section III:
Cures, Improvements, and their Costs: irtues for a Richer Bioethics

The Book of Job

The Iliad of Homer (Meeting of Achilleus and Priam)

William Shakespeare, King Lear

W. H. Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts

Mary Webb, Precious Bane

Francis Bacon, On Deformity

Richard Selzer, Witness

Lorrie Moore, People Like That Are the Only People
Here: Canonical Babblings in Peed Onk

Flannery O'Connor, Introduction to a Memoir of
Mary Ann

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (Levin Mowing)

Robert Louis Stevenson, Child's Play

Emily Dickinson, Pain Has an Element of Blank

Walt Whitman, When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer

Walker Percy, The Loss of the Creature

The Odyssey of Homer (The Lotus-Eaters)

Malcolm Gladwell, Drugstore Athlete

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker

The Book of Genesis, 9:1-9

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan and Immanuel Kant,
Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals

The Iliad of Homer (Achilleus Abuses the Body of Hektor)

The Histories of Herodotus

Willa Cather, My Ántonia

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Village Blacksmith

The Ballad of John Henry and Paul Kaplan, Henry the Accountant

John Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olive

Isaac Bashevis Singer, In My Father's Court

O. Henry, Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen

Vladimir Bukovsky, To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass