ABSTRACT
A great travesty of medical knowledge occurred in the early part of the twentieth century when medicine in its scientific mode started to turn its back on the individual and indulge in sciencefiction type activities such as eugenics and euthanasia. Their medical education tended to treat ethics as an obligatory side line, somehow unconnected with the more important scientific side of their training. The power ratio in a medical consultation plus the intimacy and indeed the privacy which is an integral part of it can be misused so that patients can be mistreated and used in a variety of ways; sometimes they are. The medical encounter has a unique set of boundaries which have to be carefully constructed and monitored. Medical practice is based on trust and patients, as a rule, see doctors and nurses as caring and practically incapable of deliberately harming them.
