Professor John Robertson, Vinson and Elkins Chair
John A. Robertson, Vinson & Elkins Chair at the School of Law, contributed two essays to a collection on caregiving in cancer entitled, Malignant: Medical Ethicists Confront Cancer. The book was favorably reviewed in a recent issue of The New Republic.
The collection’s editor, Rebecca S. Dresser, a professor at Washington University School of Law, is herself a cancer survivor. The book stems from her desire to consider illness and ethics from a personal perspective. Her collaborators in the project are all ethicists that have faced cancer in one way or another, either as patients or as caregivers.
Robertson contributed two essays to the collection: “Learning the Bad News,” and “Caregivers, Patients, and Clinicians.” Both of these essays address topics related to his wife’s fatal ovarian cancer. In discussing the issues from the perspective of a caregiver, Robertson demonstrates the conflicts that arise between patient, family, and physician and the special stresses that terminal cancer places on all involved.
The book will be published by Oxford University Press in March, 2012.