When teaching ethics in nursing school, Anne Davis likes to present students with hypothetical dilemmas they might face. In one scenario, a man in his 60s – a heavy smoker who lives with his son and daughter-in-law – is dying of lung cancer. Neither the man's physician nor his son have told him how ill he really is. One day, the man says to the nurse: "I can tell I'm not getting any better. Everybody keeps telling me I am, but I don't think so. I seem to be seriously ill. What do you think?" What should the nurse say or do?

Davis, 70, is no ordinary ethics professor. A quarter of a century ago, she wrote Ethical Dilemmas and Nursing Practice (EDNP), currently in its fourth edition. From the beginning, one of her goals was to help nurses develop critical-thinking skills to reason through ethical problems.

"The text was the first of what they call the 'modern' nursing ethics books, which is a way of saying it was principle-based, instead of talking about virtue," she says. "Everything before that had spoken about the 'good person,' the 'good nurse.' Ethical Dilemmas and Nursing Practice was a way of going outside the person and looking at ideas and setting up conceptual ways of thinking about ethical issues."

After earning a Master's degree in psychiatric nursing from Boston University in , Davis worked for more than five years in psychiatric hospitals. Lobotomies and electric shock were common. "In those days," she remembers, "the assumption was that if you were a patient in a psychiatric hospital, you were not competent to know what you wanted. There was no real concept of patients' rights, and certainly not for psychiatric patients, who were considered 'crazy.'" At staff meetings, Davis recalls, "I would say, 'I don't understand why we're doing this. She says she doesn't want this [electroshock]. She says this very clearly.' They would say, 'She's depressed,' or give some other reason: 'This is the best treatment. We know what's best for her.'"

Davis holds a PhD in education from the University of California, Berkeley, and studied ethics during a year-long Kennedy Fellowship at Harvard University in . Back in San Francisco, Davis worked as an ethics consultant at the University of California, San Francisco Hospital (UCSF), in a hospice, and at other healthcare institutions. Some of the most difficult challenges arose in the 1980s, when AIDS hit San Francisco with a terrible ferocity, and doomed patients sought assistance to die.

Davis has traveled widely – lecturing, teaching, conducting research, and serving as an ethics consultant in countries as diverse as China, Nigeria, Colombia,