Landscape and Health: Connecting Psychology, Aesthetics, and Philosophy through the Concept of Affordance.

In this paper we address a frontier topic in the humanities, namely how the cultural and natural construction that we call landscape affects well-being and health. Following an updated review of evidence-based literature in the fields of medicine, psychology, and architecture, we propose a new theoretical framework called "processual landscape," which is able to explain both the health-landscape and the medical agency-structure binomial pairs. We provide a twofold analysis of landscape, from both the cultural and naturalist points of view: in order to take into account its relationship with health, the definition of landscape as a cultural product needs to be broadened through naturalization, grounding it in the scientific domain.

Narrative autonomy: three literary models of healthcare in the end of life.

This article proposes a concept of narrative autonomy to supplement existing accounts in healthcare ethics. This is done by means of a comparison between three end-of-life scenarios: Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich and two related contemporary stories by Lorrie Moore and Bernhard Schlink, which explore some problems arising when extremely individualistic notions of patient autonomy are put into practice. It is argued that the best model for palliative care is a cooperative one in which patient autonomy is understood as essentially social, and that involves decisional, executive, informational, and narrative dimensions.

[Consent, biobanks and biomedical research law].

This article provides an overview of recent contributions to the ethical and legal debate on the use of previously collected human biobank samples. It reports how this issue has been regulated in Spain by means of the new Law on Biomedical Research as well as in the international bioethical discourse. By contrasting both approaches we identify and critically discuss a general trend moving from the traditional requirements of informed consent towards models more favourable to research in a post-genomic context.

Alternative consent models for biobanks: the new Spanish law on biomedical research.

This article provides an overview of recent contributions to the debate on the ethical use of previously collected biobank samples, as well as a country report about how this issue has been regulated in Spain by means of the new Biomedical Research Act, enacted in the summer of 2007. By contrasting the Spanish legal situation with the wider discourse of international bioethics, we identify and discuss a general trend moving from the traditional requirements of informed consent towards new models more favourable to research in a post-genomic context.