Ethics and law for the health professions. 3rd ed. Ian Kerridge, Michael Lowe, Cameron Stewart. Sydney: The Federation Press, 2009 (xxv + 895 pp). ISBN: 978 1 86287 730 6.

Comprehensive, accurate and up-to-date references on the law are indispensable in my work, so the third edition of Ethics and law for the health professions will join a couple of others to which I regularly refer.

There are chapters on truth-telling, confidentiality, consent, the limits of medical treatment, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, genetics and biotechnology, sexuality and reproduction, abortion, treatment of children, treatment of people with mental illness and with chronic diseases, the elderly, post-coma unresponsiveness, organ donation and transplantation, end-of-life care, public health, infectious diseases, indigenous health care, resource allocation, research, animals and the environment, complementary medicine, and the pharmaceutical industry; each chapter provides succinct accounts of the relevant laws, judgments and legal reasoning.

The authors clearly distinguish ethics from the law, both in general and in relation to each of the topics they discuss. They offer an informative introduction to the controversy among jurisprudents about how best to think about the nature of the law. The book also has a useful table of cases, table of statutes and an index.

I would have only one minor reservation about recommending the book as a text in bioethics: the ethical content is not as strong as the legal content. As an example, the authors say that, with technological change and the passage of time, our ethics must change. However, this assumes that ethics is a set of very specific, very detailed, very current rules about how we should act. Further, the doctrine of the sanctity of life, properly understood, neither says nor implies that it is morally prohibited intentionally to let a person die or that it is morally prohibited to base decisions relating to the prolongation or shortening of human life on considerations of the kind or quality of a person’s life.

That said, Ethics and the law for health professions will be a useful reference work for health care professionals.