The history of Western medicine chronicles a tension between ideologies of patient care—the holistic Hippocratic view and the specialization view, with a depersonalization of the patient that coincides with the rise of pathologic anatomy in the early modern era.

Critical skills required to weigh decisions with serious consequences, manipulate information rationally, and choose wisely are skills that are likely to be impaired by frontal lobe injury that results in personality change.

People with mental illness or a degenerative mental disease have special protections under the law when entering into contracts or other binding documents.

Not all cultural traditions have the same conception of personhood. In Confucianism, self-individuation takes place only through engagement with others in the context of one’s social roles and relationships.

How to treat a patient with a dissociative identity disorder and how to manage a threat made by one of the patient's personalities.

It is more important to test and treat prisoners for HIV infection and AIDS than simply to distribute condoms in prison.

The medical and non-medical information that a physician should consider when deciding whether or not to place a patient on the organ transplant waiting list.

Discussion of a journal article about an attempt to measure empathy among physicians who care for the incarcerated.

Prison patients are never alone and never without supervision and rules, and the medical staff is always negotiating its power with the administration. The patient-doctor relationship can become distorted in this setting.

Many prison doctors agree that treating inmate patients is different: distrust, suspicion, and deception on the part of both parties are common.