The Quinlan Case
The Quinlan case gained enormous public attention and sympathy for the right to die and highlighted the problems involved in having too much, rather than too little, access to medical care and technology. In addition, the Quinlan case signaled both the entry of lawyers and the legal system into health care decision making and the problems with using the courts to decide such intensely personal issues.
Bioethics and Medical Research During the same years, concern grew not only about the ethics of medical practice but also about the ethics of medical research. These concerns were initially brought to public attention in 1966 when Henry Beecher published an article in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine describing 22 recent research studies, published in top medical journals, that had relied on ethically questionable methods. In one study, for example, soldiers sick with streptococcal infections received experimental treatments instead of penicillin, causing 25 soldiers to develop rheumatic fever. In another, doctors inserted catheters into the bladders of healthy newborns and x-rayed them with- out parental consent to study how bladders worked.
To determine the frequency of such studies, Beecher looked at 100 consecutive research studies published in a prestigious medical journal. In 12 of the 100 studies, researchers had not told subjects of the risks involved in the experiments or had not even told the subjects they were in an experiment. Yet no journal reviewer, editor, or reader had questioned the ethics of these studies.
