American medicine is in crisis.
To put this crisis in perspective, however, consider the state of medicine in the United States 150 years ago. Excited by this generous impulse, it comes with the majesty of its might, to vindicate its rights, and to redress its wrongs. The AMA's Code of Ethics was unlike any ethics subscribed to by any earlier group of medical practitioners. No national assemblage had ever proposed to bind all of its members by a uniform code of ethics, and no previous code of ethics had ever been formulated as an explicit social contract between the profession, its patients, and the public. In the Code of Ethics, each of the contracting parties is envisioned as having correlative rights and responsibilities.