Abstract
Medical decisions today are apt to involve many people besides the physician and the patient: members of review boards and ethics committees, lawyers, bioethicists, regulators, and representatives of the courts. Before the mid-1960s, however, physicians' primacy in this area was virtually complete. How this transformation occurred is the subject of Rothman's well-researched, well-written, wide-ranging, and thoughtful book.
Medical research came of age during World War II, and it engendered an outlook in which the ends justified the means; this attitude — strengthened by stunning medical breakthroughs —came to characterize the postwar expansion of research. In 1966, the late Dr. Henry . . .