David Seedhouse, Chichester, Wiley, 1998, 232 pages, £15.99.

The second edition of Seedhouse's well-known book comes ten years after the first. Like the first, the second edition will undoubtedly be well received by many, including teachers, students and practitioners of health care. Indeed one is tempted to suggest that, if a medical or nursing student read only one ethics text in the course of his or her training, then this would be a good choice. If students and practitioners of health care management, policy-makers and civil servants could also be persuaded to read it then this would be a bonus.

Seedhouse's style is highly personal and individual. He takes pleasure in being irreverent, provocative and controversial. This is most certainly not a textbook in the academic tradition of neutrality and impartialism. Seedhouse has a clear agenda of his own and strongly held views about the nature of health care and the place of ethics within that domain. He is self- assured and self-confident almost to the point of arrogance, writing un-selfconsciously of the “secret of the book's success”, describing the work as “genuinely philosophy applied” and “long overdue”. “Here …