| Sumario: | Harriet Washington's latest book, Carte Blanche: The Erosion of Medical Consent, examines several cases of exploitation within different U.S. populations involved in medical experimentation. She argues that "consent has been whittled away not by successful ethical argument or by persuasion but because the U.S. medical research system maintains subjects in a voiceless and uninformed state." Protections promised by the early medico‐legal ideal of consent were never universal, and exceptions favoring the aims of researchers over the well‐being of vulnerable groups have become the norm. Carte Blanche explores how ever‐growing categories of people are vulnerable to becoming unwitting subjects of medical research as consent is overridden in the name of emergencies, military utility, and scientific progress.
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