Addresses such questions as: What is the place of individual choice and consequence in a post-Holocaust world of continuing genocidal ethnic cleansing? Is "identity" now a last-ditch cultural defence of ethnic nationalisms and competing fundamentalisms? And how do we define "rights", self-interest and civic duties?
Arguing that modern medicine is finally a story of individual talent - and the revelatory "moment of truth" - that transforms both scientist and the science of medicine, this fascinating book focuses on four figures who, at critical times during the course of a century, brought medicine a quantum leap forward.