Consent or Obedience? Power and Authority in Medicine

A recent biography of the social psychologist Stanley Milgram (The Man Who Shocked the World, by Thomas Blass) details the “obedience experiments” that made Milgram famous. These studies demonstrated that ordinary people could be induced by an authority to deliver to a victim what they believed were increasingly harmful electric shocks. Milgram's contribution was not in showing that human beings obey authority, but in demonstrating how powerful and potentially dangerous that predisposition is. It doesn't take evil or deranged people to do awful things to others; normal people will act that way if commanded by a legitimate authority. Sadly, . . .