研究生公共英语教材阅读B第3、4、10、11、14课文原文及翻译.docxVIP

Unite 3 Doctor’s Dilemma: Treat or Let Die?Abigail Trafford1. Medical advancesin wonder drugs, daring surgical procedures, radiation therapies, and intensive-care units have brought new life to thousands of people. Yet to many of them, modern medicine has become a double-edged sword.2. Doctor’s power to treat with an array of space-age techniques has outstripped the body’s capacity to heal. More medical problems can be treated, but for many patients, there is little hope of recovery. Even the fundamental distinction between life and death has been blurred.3. Many Americans are caught in medical limbo, as was the South Korean boxer Duk Koo Kim, who was kept alive by artificial meansafter he had been knocked unconscious in a fight and his brain ceased to function. With the permission of his family, doctors in Las Vegas disconnected the life-support machines and death quickly followed.4. In the wake oftechnology’s advances in medicine, a heated debate is taking place in hospitals and nursing homes across the country--- over whether survival or quality of life is the paramount goal of medicine.5. “It gets down to what medicine is all about, ” says Daniel Callahan, director of the Institute of Society, Ethics, and the Life Sciences in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. “Is it really to save a life? Or is the larger goal the welfare of the patient?”6. Doctors, patients, relatives, and often the courts are being forced to make hard choices in medicine. Most often it is at the two extremes of life that these difficulty ethical questions arise --- at the beginning for the very sick newborn and at the end for the dying patient.7. The dilemma posed by modern medical technology has created the growing new discipline or bioethics. Many of the country’s 127 medical schools now offer courses in medical ethics, a field virtually ignored only a decade ago. Many hospitals have chaplains, philosophers, psychiatrists, and social workers on the staff to help patients make crucial decisions,