ABSTRACT

Obtaining ‘informed consent’ is now fi rmly established as a preeminent legal and ethical requirement in medical practice and research. The specialized health law, bioethics, and medical literature abound with discussions of its precise meaning and content, explorations of the various challenges to informed consent and, increasingly, empirical studies about informed consent practices. This contemporary literature does not question the value of informed consent, but rather generally focuses on how informed consent can best be obtained and promoted or, in specifi c circumstances, how it may need to be delayed or replaced by surrogate procedures that respect its underlying value. It is therefore hard to imagine that informed consent has become such a moral and legal mainstay only in recent decades.