The author of this book is a Dutch psychiatrist who has written a readable, often fascinating and sometimes shocking book on medical ethics. While van den Berg is concerned almost exclusively with issues such as medication and surgery pertinent to a medical practice, he makes a strong

appeal for physicians to include emotional understanding of their patients when they make ethical judgments. He illustrates this appeal with a number of examples describing the usual way, contrasted with what he thinks is a preferable way of telling a patient that she has cancer or that some radical surgical procedure might be needed to prolong her life. Van den Berg feels that life-altering medical decisions should be made by patients themselves after getting full information from their physician. Throughout the book he is concerned with the emotional impact of illness on a patient and on the patient's family and by implication, on the treating physician who, van den Berg implies, often acts out of his own emotional needs.