Abstract

There are different ways in which law and ethics come into play in the face of issues that touch on fundamental moments of human existence: birth, pain, disease, death. In recent years these themes have become the object of a particular branch of ethics, which has taken the name of bioethics. For the jurist, dealing with bioethical questions means confronting the limits of law, insufficient to enlighten a field whose object of analysis transcends what the system is able to describe. It thus seems useful to try to place some of the issues raised by bioethics in the organisational context where medical practise takes place and where the patient comes to relate with the administrative system that ought to ensure the right of the same to health care.