Alfred I Tauber, Cambridge, Mass, The MIT Press, 1999, 159 + xviii pages, £17.50 (hb).

Tauber's book outlines a philosophy of medicine that sees an ethos of caring as the central imperative of a doctor. Three broad claims are defended in the text. First, Tauber is sceptical of conceptions of medicine that treat physicians as primarily scientists or the agents of profit-makers or administrators. For such conceptions fail to consider the patient as a whole or his/her personalised suffering as demanding empathy.

Second, he criticises conceptions of medical ethics that emphasise personal autonomy. After a brief account of how, he thinks, the ideal of autonomy was invented and developed in Western thought, Tauber questions the significance of autonomy in medicine. Because of …