Why I Love Moral Dilemmas
Apparently I’m most interested in writing true stories about events that, in essence, center on moral contradictions.
My first trade book, Donora Death Fog: Clean Air and the Tragedy of a Pennsylvania Mill Town, was about a group of people forced to endure a disaster that could have been foreseen but who largely supported the corporation that caused that disaster to begin with. Many of the good people of the Monongahela valley refused to believe that their employer, US Steel, could possibly have had something to do with a six-day smog in 1948 that killed twenty-one of their neighbors. They just didn’t want to believe it.
As I related in the book:
How can you find fault with a company critical to the outcome of WWII and that pays you to work even though working for that company can kill you, maim you, or give you life-threatening cancer?
My forthcoming book, The Doctors’ Riot of 1788: Body Snatching, Bloodletting, and Anatomy in America, centers on a similar moral dilemma. From the 1700s until the passage of the nation’s Uniform Anatomical Gift Act in 1968, physicians and anatomists have tried to balance the need to obtain fresh cadavers, so their students could learn the fundamentals of anatomy, with the community’s aversion to the practice of body snatching and its heartfelt desire to respect their dead.
I write in the first chapter, “Is it moral to dissect a body for the betterment of medical students if that body was illegally obtained? Said another way: Does the future health of the living outweigh society’s need to maintain the dignity of the dead?”
That’s just the kind of moral morass I love to delve into, I guess, a enlightenment that came only last night as I was lying in bed, next to my beautiful, sniffling wife. (She has a cold.)
Anyway, here is the cover for my new book, due out next fall from Prometheus Books, an imprint of Globe Pequot Press.
If you'd like an email announcement of its impending publication, shoot me an email at andymcpheebooks@gmail.com.