Includes bibliographies and index.

Do cancer patients want to be told? / William D. Kelly and Stanley R. Friesen -- What to tell cancer patients : a study of medical attitudes / Donald Oken -- Medical diagnosis : our right to know the truth / Joseph Fletcher -- Truth and the physician / Bernard C. Meyer -- Death : process or event? / Robert S. Morison -- Death as an event : a commentary on Robert Morrison / Leon R. Kass -- A definition of irreversible coma / Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death -- Refinements in criteria for the determination of death : an appraisal / Task Force on Death and Dying of the Institute of Society, Ethics, and the Life Sciences -- A statutory definition of the standards for determining human death : an appraisal and a proposal / Alexander Morgan Capron and Leon R. Kass -- Tucker v. Lower / Law and Equity Court of the City of Richmond, Virginia -- Moral and ethical dilemmas in the special-care nursery / Raymond S. Duff and A. G. M. Campbell -- Mongolism, parental desires, and the right to life / James M. Gustafson -- To save or let die : the dilemma of modern medicine / Richard A. McCormick -- Maine Medical Center v. Houle / Superior Court of the State of Maine -- On (only) caring for the dying / Paul Ramsey -- Prolonging life / George P. Fletcher -- A patient's decision to decline lifesaving medical treatment : bodily integrity versus the preservation of life / Norman L. Cantor -- In the matter of Karen Quinlan, an alleged incompetent / Superior Court of New Jersey Chancery Division Morris County -- In the matter of Karen Quinlan, an alleged incompetent / Supreme Court of New Jersey -- An alternative to the ethic of euthanasia / Arthur J. Dyck -- Should there be a legal right to die? / Robert F. Drinan -- Justifying the final solution / Helge Hilding Mansson -- Deciding for yourself : the objections / Daniel Maguire -- Ethics and euthanasia / Joseph Fletcher -- Preventing suicide / Edwin S. Shneidman -- The ethics of suicide / Thomas S. Szasz -- Philosophical and ethical considerations of suicide prevention / Paul W. Pretzel.

The first edition of this book was published in 1977. At that time the field of thanatology, the study of death and dying, was still reasonably new and was dominated by research done by psychiatrists and social scientists. The most notable person in the field at the time was Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, who was widely credited with having brought thanatology into public view with the 1969 publication of her book On Death and Dying. Two research centers on death and dying were gaining national reputations: The Foundation of Thanatology in New York (Austin Kutscher, director), and the Center for Death Education and Research (Robert Fulton, director) at the University of Minnesota.