Joel Stephen Williams' Ph.D. Dissertation

Baylor University, 1987

Dr. Daniel McGee, major professor

Ethical Issues in Compulsory Medical Treatment:

A Study of Jehovah's Witnesses and Blood Transfusion

Copyright 1987 All Rights Reserved

Please read the following:

A word of explanation is in order concerning the format of my dissertation. It was originally done on a Commodore 64 computer back in the mid-1980s. In order to put it on my web page, I scanned the original manuscript, converted the scanned images to text, and then converted them from a text document to .html. In the process of scanning and conversion, minor errors have crept in. E.g., a "1" might be scanned and converted as an "l", or quote marks becomes "11" , or a "J" becomes a "j" or an "o" becomes an "O". I have caught as many of these as I had time to find, but there are surely many more. These minor flaws, though, should not hinder the reader in any significant way. Also, the scanning process does not make superscript numbers for footnotes as a superscript. At this point I have not bothered to convert those numbers since there are so many of them. The titles of published works were originally underlined. In the .html version they are neither underlined nor italicized. Finally, the layout on the screen is not proportional to the original layout and double spacing has been converted to single spacing, but again, this should not hinder the reader from studying my dissertation. Even though it is not as attractive, original page divisions with footnotes at the bottom of the page have been left as in the original just in case someone needs to quote from my dissertation and wants the citation to be accurate. If you find significant typos, I would appreciate your noting them in an email. Authors are welcome to use short quotations from my dissertation for review or scholarly writing. I would appreciate it, though, if you would please make adjustments for the conversion peculiarities noted above rather than filling the quotations with "sic" where that probably would not be true of the original dissertation. "Sic" has its place in scholarly writing, but there are some authors who view themselves as critics and guardians of the truth who use "sic" in an ungentlemanly manner. They scour the writings of others, hunting for a typo. When they find it, they use the surrounding sentences as a quotation in their review, whether it is a significant quotation or not, so that they can "sic" the author with an air of superiority and arrogance. Thank you for your interest in my work on bioethics.

Joel Stephen Williams

Introduction and Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Selected Bibliography

Back to Kerygma's main page