The story of two doctors, a father and son, who practiced in very different
times and the evolution of the ethics that profoundly influence health care
As a practicing physician and longtime member of his hospital's ethics
committee, Dr. Barron Lerner thought he had heard it all. But in the mid-1990s,
his father, an infectious diseases physician, told him a stunning story: he had
physically placed his body over an end-stage patient who had stopped breathing,
preventing his colleagues from performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation, even
though CPR was the ethically and legally accepted thing to do. Over the next few
years, the senior Dr. Lerner tried to