Rosemary Quigley, who died at age 33 on September 6 of double pneumonia at a Boston hospital, was a medical ethicist who used her own disease – she suffered from cystic fibrosis – as an inspiration for her career.

Quigley was an authority on medical decision making, as well as on the protection of human research subjects. At the time of her death, she was an assistant professor of medical ethics and health policy at Baylor University.

Quigley graduated from Harvard and the University of Michigan, where she earned a law degree and a master’s in health management and policy.

In 1993, while still at Harvard, she received a fellowship to interview families of children with cystic fibrosis in Great Britain, Ireland, and the Netherlands.

“In return for their tales, I owe my families a depiction of health,” she wrote. “Disease is my entree to their experience, as our common burden relieves them of tedious explanation. But hope is my currency: what I offer in exchange for their help. An ill visitor seeking confidence is more than an intrusive guest, she is a specter of future plague – evidence of the disease in me could doom their child. It is hard to convince young parents of the uncontainable clinical continuum, that some will die tragically young and others will survive long into adulthood.”

In February, Quigley underwent a double lung transplant, and wrote about the experience a month later in the online magazine Slate.

“It is not hard to imagine living much longer than a decade with these new lungs,” she wrote in Slate. “I don’t mean to be greedy, but I think I’ll always want more of life. At the same time, I am grateful to have had as much as I’ve been given.”

In May, Quigley married; at her funeral, her husband, Jeffrey Harris, eulogized her as a “fireball.”