Strangers at the bedside: a history of how law and bioethics transformed medical decision making

Abstract

Reviewstraditional medical criteria of triage.Seattle appears to have been the only patient selection committee to evaluate prospective patients explicitly in terms of a utilitarian standard of "social worth"; it was the only committee to have become embroiled in public controversy.2Thus the moral of the early dialysis crisis would seem to be that health professionals selecting patients according to an "old" medical principle, triage, were able to allocate scarce resources with few problems, while committees on which lay members introduced non-medical selection criteria, like "social worth", became embroiled in controversy.It is only by forgetting about the 192 non-controversial committees, and about lay participation on the Seattle Committee, that Jonsen can tell his tale of the failure of "old" medical ethics and the concomitant search for a new bioethic.To vex Jonsen with facts, however, is to commit what philosophers call a "category mistake".Johnson is not aiming at academic history but aggadah.He isolates, juxtaposes, and embellishes to illuminate, to reveal, to inspire-and he does so brilliantly.