Strangers at the Bedside: A History of How Law and Bioethics Transformed Medical Decision Making

Item

Title: Strangers at the Bedside: A History of How Law and Bioethics Transformed Medical Decision Making
ABP identifier: ABP-W-0028
Date: 1991
Type: Book
Description: Rothman traced the decline of medicine’s largely self-regulating authority from the postwar expansion of human experimentation through research scandals, new federal rules, court decisions, and bedside controversies. His “strangers” include lawyers, judges, philosophers, regulators, and lay participants who entered decisions once treated as the physician’s domain.
Intellectual stream: Law & public policy; Institution building
Verification status: Verified
Evidence confidence: High
Historical significance: Rothman traced the decline of medicine’s largely self-regulating authority from the postwar expansion of human experimentation through research scandals, new federal rules, court decisions, and bedside controversies. His “strangers” include lawyers, judges, philosophers, regulators, and lay participants who entered decisions once treated as the physician’s domain. The book is both a history of bioethics and an argument about institutional change. It shows that new ethical ideas gained force through commissions, courts, review boards, and hospital procedures. For students, it offers a corrective to histories that explain bioethics only through landmark texts or abstract principles, while also inviting scrutiny of whose voices the new institutions did and did not include.