The Wellcome Trust illustrated history of tropical diseases

Notices", distilled from earlier disciplinary cases, were a weak substitute for a uniform and generally binding ethical code. Further questions of a comparative nature may be asked on the basis of this book. Juxtaposition of the AMA's and Styrap's code reveals interesting differences that require explanation. For instance, the latter allowed breaches of confidentiality in cases of "threatening insanity, or of pertinacious concealment of pregnancy after seduction", and it detailed the conditions under which care of a patient could be relinquished by the doctorissues that were missing in the otherwise equivalent paragraphs of the AMA code. More broadly, one might ask whether the American medical profession's dealing with cases of misconduct (Baker discusses one case with regard to the Boston medical police) differed significantly from that of the British, given the different "fate" of medical ethics in the two countries. As the current work of this reviewer indicates, late nineteenth-century Prussia, with its long academic tradition of linking medicine with law (see Johanna Geyer-Kordesch in the first volume), created a medical conduct jurisdiction which was similar to the British. Combining relevant source materials with thought-provoking philosophical and historical studies, this volume-as its predecessorclearly constitutes an important step forward in the serious historiography of medical ethics.