Health Wars

Book excerpt: In these essays from the New York Review of Books, the Lancet, London Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement, Richard Horton examines how conceptions of disease and its treatment have changed over the centuries and looks at an array of medical questions facing both the individual and society. Covering a wide array of subjects from controversies over HIV/AIDS to the Human Genome Project to the debate over euthanasia, Horton argues eloquently for a new understanding of patients not as subjects but as people, and shows how society benefits from an appreciation of what disease does, not only to human bodies but to the human spirit.