Not long ago the book by Mgr Charles Vella on the ethics for the sick was issued in Maltese thanks to the excellent translation of Manwel D. Schembri. The book was originally published in Italian and later translated into English.

I hope that this little treasure of a book will be translated into other languages for the benefit of the sick in other countries too.

Ethics is not too difficult a word to explain. It is simply a set of rules or standards. It is the application of ethics to a particular subject that starts to be more difficult especially when the subject is as delicate as Mgr Vella deals with, namely ethics in the service of the sick, or considering the author's experience at San Raffaele, simply ethics around the sick.

It is certainly not easy to deal with the sick and their innumerable situations and questions. Even Mgr Vella was stumped the first time that someone asked him whether he ever thought about dying. Sickness or dying is never an easy subject to deal with and the book puts the questions of ethics and the sick in the most human way possible.

The author was not satisfied to deal with the question of ethics generally but applies the ethical norms to the various illnesses and questions he encountered in his many years in the service of the sick.

I have had the privilege of being on the receiving end of Mgr Vella's mission while accompanying my wife for so many weeks at San Raffaele. This gives a special insight to the book and while listening to the various eminent persons at the presentation of the Maltese version recently, I could not help but reflect on his dedication that gave me and my wife encouragement and solace on his daily visit to us in Milan and later in Malta too. It was not surprising that the doctors, nurses and staff of San Raffale held him in such high esteem.

But you do not have to have had this privilege to appreciate the richness and the experience of this work, which in my opinion had certainly filled a void in the relationship between the sick and their carers whether, as Mgr Vella put it himself, they are doctors, nurses or spiritual advisers.

Mgr Vella annotates his book by making references to authorities like Carl Rogers and others who produced a wealth of literature and information setting the norms and standards of how to deal with the difficult cases of sickness and the sick with a human touch, to move away from dealing with the sick as simply numbers.

A quick look at the bibliography at the end of the book and the note on the author will leave no doubt that Mgr Vella was eminently qualified to write such a book!