Abstract

The history of American medical ethics is a notoriously unwieldy field that encompasses an enormous amount of complex material. No single book can realistically analyze all of its dimensions in a genuinely scholarly fashion. But Robert Baker, one of the nation’s most distinguished professors in that field, has now provided the rest of us with an immensely helpful survey of one of its most important aspects: the evolution of what he terms “the formalized statements of medical morality” (164). Much of Before Bioethics: A History of American Medical Ethics from the Colonial Period to the Bioethics Revolution traces, in an almost genealogical manner, medicine’s shifting behavioral codes and ethical systems from ..