"Professionalizing modern medicine" in French hospitals. Essay review.

historians' interest in death has been highly selective. None has yet given us a broad survey, grounded in the history of ideas, of how the medical profession's attitudes towards death and the treatment of the dying has been congruent with or divergent from those of other educated and professional groups such as judges and priests. Moreover, we also know little about how the practical and ethical problems of caring for and treating the dying have shaped doctors' beliefs on this issue. All such questions have major contemporary resonances in this age of spare-part surgery and life-support systems, with their attendant ethical dilemmas. It is an area where medical historians ought not to be caught napping and allow their clothes to be stolen by social historians and historians of ideas. Roy Porter Wellcome Institute