Medizin und Kolonialimperialismus: Deutschland 1884–1945

first time in almost two centuries, Gregory's lectures on medical ethics. McCullough has enhanced the value of these lectures by including previously unpublished student lecture notes. These notes permit us to chart the evolution of Gregory's ideas, and, indeed, the formation of core concepts of bioethics. Consider, for example, the evolution of what is probably the first use of the expression "patient's rights" in English. In 1767 a medical student recorded Gregory declaiming that, "If the [dying] patient or his friends insist in applying [a medicine not approved by the physician], let them do so. Why not let a man die in his own way if he will?" (p. 75). In the Observations (1770), Gregory says, "a physician has no right to hinder any man from going out of the world in his own way"' (p. 107). Two years later, in the Lectures, which Gregory himself published, he wrote: "Every man has a right to speak where his life or his health is concerned, and every man may suggest what he thinks may tend to save the life of his friend. If a patient is determined to try an improper or dangerous medicine, a physician should refuse his sanction, but he has no right to complain of his advice not being followed" (p. 174, emphasis added). These passages suggest that the concept of patients' rights-which is central to contemporary bioethics-originates in a simple observation: "Why not let a man die in his own way if he will?" As years progress, Gregory's language hardens into the more formal statement that, "Every man has a right to speak where his life or his health is concerned"-perhaps the earliest and certainly one of the clearest evocations of the concept that a patient has rights. Gregory's words are too important to lie, largely unread, in rare book rooms. Everyone interested in the history of medical ethics is indebted to McCullough for making them accessible once more in a well-edited authoritative edition. While the topic of medicine and health in the British Empire has drawn the attention of several historians during the 1980s and 1990s, German colonial medicine has remained a comparatively neglected area of research-except for the contributions by the Heidelberg medical historian Wolfgang Eckart. With his Medizin und Kolonialimperialismus he has now presented his magnum opus, which covers all the Islands), and on the Chinese shore (Kiauchou). Moreover, he examines the participation of …