This is a book about medical ethics, written from a viewpoint that only a medical doctor could be privy to, but with tremendous insight and compassion for the point of view of the patient. It is a deeply thoughtful book; profound, and yet written with great simplicity and clarity. The questions it poses are addressed to the medical profession, but anyone who has ever struggled to get adequate treatment from the medical profession will find it equally important to read, and will experience a strong sense of affirmation and a realization that they are not alone. Moreover, the questions are ones that the medical profession will probably never attempt to respond to, unless they are asked by a great many more people. The case studies that Dr. Cooper uses to illustrate his point of view have to do with a condition called muscular dystonia (dystonia musculorum deformans), because the surgical treatment of that condition was his specialty. The book came to my attention because of the fact that my own son suffers from this same condition, and I will freely admit that the book is particularly important to me for that reason. But I very strongly believe that the questions that are being asked are of much broader importance than the specific condition. They are questions that relate not only to the medical profession as a whole, but to any and every field of service that has become weighted down with bureaucracy. As such, the book is even more important now than when it was first published nearly thirty years ago

I checked this book out of my school library and couldn't put it down. It is a great read and is very interesting. It is the story of Irving Cooper, an experimental brain surgeon, and how he tries to get his research accepted by his colleagues and also how he helps so many people that thought they would be incapacitated for life. Buy this book!