As head of the department of Medical Ethics for Britain's Chief Rabbi's office, Rabbi Nisson E. Shulman was entrusted with the task of responding to questions on halakhah (Jewish law) and medicine which came from virtually all over the world, and from a wide variety of sources: from government agencies such as the Ministry of Foods and Fisheries, from Medical Foundations and groups such as the Nuffield Foundation, the College of Physicians of Edinburgh, the Lingard Fertility Clinic in Australia, from groups with polemic agendas such as the Lynx Organization fighting the fur trade, and from individuals who had questions about the Jewish view on current medical issues. Thus, nurses, physicians, students, and researchers turned to the Chief Rabbi's office for material. Even a group of physicians, theologians, and ethicists, gathered for the express purpose of seeking to forestall medicine's possible degeneration into the kind of science that produced Nazi "medicine," and which met as a "Human Values in Health Care Discussion Group," utilized the Chief Rabbi's office through Rabbi Shulman for some of their deliberations.


This book selects a number of questions to which the answers actually encompass medical ethics issues including genetic engineering, new birth techniques, surrogate parenthood, embryo research, marriage, sex selection, saving and preserving life, transplant surgery, scarce resources, care of the critically ill, living will, organ donations and transplants, and even touches upon disaster management. Rabbi Shulman has organized and collected answers to the most frequently asked questions. Many of the question selected had been asked repeatedly and are therefore to be considered very much on today's agenda.


Some of the questions arose because of specific events, such as the discovery of the remains of the Jewish martyrs of York and their reburial, thus making it possible for Jews to visit that city again. Others originated from students coping with planned research projects. Still others w