British Medical Bulletin Advance Access published online on February 21, 2008
British Medical Bulletin, doi:10.1093/bmb/ldn010
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Editor's Choice
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Once again the British Medical Bulletin presents an extraordinarily wide range of excellent reviews by experts.
First, we have an review on ‘Research on the recently dead: an historical and ethical examination’ (Pages ??) by Tomasini from the University of Central Lancashire and Lancaster University.
This paper briefly outlines the history of research on the recently dead, before critically exploring in what sense can we harm the dead and the arguments for employing family or parental consent for medical research on dead relatives? He makes the point that the controversy surrounding harm in relation to research on dead bodies largely depends on how dead people are perceived.
Controversy over whether we need to have consent from significant others (bereaved relatives) depends on the weight we give to the bereaved and their experience of the dead. Understanding this is timely in developing research and is relevant to the issue of consent