Our understanding of gender carries significant bioethical implications. An errant account of gender-specific disease can lead to overgeneralizations, undergeneralizations, and misdiagnoses. It can also lead to problems in the structure of health-care delivery, the creation of policy, and the development of clinical curricula.

In this volume, Cutter argues that gender-specific disease and related bioethical discourses are philosophically integrative. Gender-specific disease is integrative because the descriptive roles of gender, disease, and their relation are inextricably tied to their prescriptive roles within frames of reference. An integrative account of gender-specific disease carries ethical implications because our understanding of gender-specific disease is evaluative, and our evaluations of gender-specific disease entail judgments concerning the praiseworthiness and blameworthiness of a clinical event. Cutter supports a "both/and" emphasis on context and integration in relation to gender-specific disease and bioethical analyses.

While the text mainly focuses on gender-specific diseases that affect women, Cutter also includes examples involving men, children, and members of the LGBT community.

• Cover 2
• Title Page 5
• Copyright Page 6
• Table of Contents 8
• Preface 9
• 1 Background 16
• 2 Gender-Specific Disease: Descriptive Analysis 34
• 3 Gender-Specific Disease: Prescriptive Analysis 50
• 4 Gender-Specific Disease: Contextual Analysis 64
• 5 An Integrative Approach to Gender-Specific Disease 75
• 6 Rethinking Gender-Specific Disease Nomenclature and Taxonomies 89
• 7 Toward an Integrative Bioethics 99
• 8 Integrative Bioethics and Assessing Gender-Specific Disease 112
• 9 Implications for Health Care for Men, Children, and Members of the LGBT Communities 125
• 10 Some Lessons and Challenges 134