Seeking Medicine’s Moral Centre

Ethicist, gerontologist, and journalist Tom Koch has written about “Assisted Dying” since 1995. With it, a bottom-up, practical medical ethic stable for more than two millennia has been exchanged for a top-down, bureaucratic, and commercial ethic of medicine. In this collection, articles range from the 1995 stabbing death of Cecil Brush by his wife, Jean, to a review of five years of MAiD (Medical Assistance in Dying) legislation in Canada. With journal, magazine, and newspaper articles, Koch creates an anthropology of ethics to understand this transformation and what it means both for medicine and in society.

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Ethics in Everyday Places

In Ethics in Everyday Places, ethicist and geographer Tom Koch considers what happens when, as he puts it, “you do everything right but know you've done something wrong." The resulting moral stress and injury, he argues, are pervasive in modern Western society. Koch makes his argument "from the ground up," from the perspective of average persons, and through a revealing series of maps in which issues of ethics and morality are embedded.

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WICN Interview

CKNW Interview

In Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground (University of Chicago Press, 2011) medical geographer Tom Koch makes a new, and important argument: It is in the mapping of individual cases of illness as group events that we have come to understand disease as a public thing affecting general populations. Maps become, in this telling, the workbench on which a collection of individual cases are combined to create a single health event, seen in place. It is thus in the mapping, and the environmental thinking that mapping promotes, that theories about this or that disease (and health in general) are first formulated and then tested.

New Republic Review

Haggett Review

CMAJ Published Review