Bioethics

“The new rules for the laboratory permeated the examining room, circumscribing the discretionary authority of the individual physician. The doctor-patient relationship was molded on the form of the research-subject; in therapy, as in experimentation, formal and informal mechanisms of control and a new language of patients’ rights assumed unprecedented importance. . . . Jonas’s image of the doctor alone in the examining room with the patient (and with God) gave way to the image of an examining room with hospital committee members, lawyers, bioethicists, and accountants virtually crowding out the doctor. . . . In the post-World War II period, a social process that had been underway for some time reached its culmination: the doctor turned into a stranger, and the hospital became a strange institution. Doctors became a group apart from their patient and from their society as well, encapsulated in a very isolated and isolating universe” (Rothman, 107, 108).