In The Healer's Power, Howard Brody placed the concept
of power at the heart of medicine's moral discourse. Struck by the
absence of “power” in the prevailing vocabulary of medical
ethics, yet aware of peripheral allusions to power in the writings of some
medical ethicists, he intuited the importance of power from the silence
surrounding it. He formulated the problem of the healer's power and
its responsible use as “the central ethical problem in
medicine.” Through the prism of power he refracted a wide range of
ethical problems, from informed consent to truth-telling, from
confidentiality to futility, from the physician's fantasies to the
physician's virtues. At times this prism shed new light on old
problems, enabling us to see from an unexpected angle the elements of
which the problem was composed. At other times it exposed issues of
ethical significance that had been neglected in the bioethics
literature.