ABSTRACT
We have had five years of health reform in Britain. And, as Berlin says, ‘The oak cannot return to the condition of the acorn’.1 We need now to go on to empowerment and to a new ethical structure which can accommodate the new medicine. This entails a moral framework which can bear the weight of change and command the assent of society. This is a difficult request. We would each like all’s well to end well, so that, as Shakespeare says in the eponymous play, ‘health shall live free, and sickness freely die’.2 But how is this to be achieved?
