The Christian Century

The Body of Compassion: Ethics, Medicine, and the Church, by Joel James Shuman

Joel James Shuman's boyhood hero was his grandfather, a hardworking farmer and woodsman from West Virginia who was faithful to his family, the land, his traditions and his church. Even leukemia did not change his work habits and life patterns. But a surgical intervention meant to arrest the cancer went poorly, and the grandfather died from subsequent complications, "alone in a hospital, hours from home, denied an active role in the last days of his life by a world that was almost completely foreign to him . . ."