Margaret Somerville is the director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University (Canada) and the author of The Ethical Imagination: Journeys of the Human Spirit. In addition to her writing, lectures and teaching, Margaret Somerville is a licensed pharmacist and an attorney.In this cogent article for Mercator, she explores the example of one family's fight to save their father from the new and terribly sterile practice of medicine in which slogans of "futile care," "quality of life," and "non-intervention" clash with traditional (and more humane) ethics.
