Journals, centres and associations devoted to medical issues proliferate. Hardly a day goes by without a media analysis of one or another ethical dilemma arising from our newfound ability to alter the natural conditions of life. What this book says is that, although bioethics is a consciously interdisciplinary field, it has not attracted the cooperation of many sociologists. In fact, sociologists specialising in the study of medicine have in many cases observed its development with a certain ambivalence. In their analyses of complex situations, ethicists often seem completely unaware of the social and cultural context in which they occur, or even of any kind of empirical references. Nor do they seem to be very aware of the cultural specificity of many of the values and procedures they use in making ethical judgements.