ABSTRACT
Nearly 40 years ago the psychiatrist Erik Erikson1 memorably described each patient as ‘a universe of one’. In this spirit, I have chosen as my topic: Who owns our bodies? The answer is not obvious. Who owns our bodies? Whose life is it, anyway? How is this ownership to be expressed? This is the fundamental question of how to live, put in special terms. The answers may seem unsurprising, indeed intuitively obvious. But is this so?
