Medicine: To Feed Or Not to Feed?

An A.M.A. panel rules on the ethics of treating the comatose

John Jobes vividly remembers the day in 1971 when he first met his future wife Nancy. Both were high school students in Parsippany, N.J. "She was a very independent, headstrong, loving person," he recalls. They married a few years after graduation, when John was working as a machinist and Nancy as a lab technician. Then six years ago, while she was pregnant with their first child, Nancy was injured in a traffic accident; several bones were broken, and the baby was lost. "She was a real tiger and a real fighter," John recalls, but her struggle to recover ended abruptly during...

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