BOOK REVIEWS Disputing Doctors: the Socio-Legal Dynamics of Complaints about

This book provides an important analysis of what happens when trust between doctors and patients breaks down. It is well refer-enced and Professor Mulcahy’s arguments are amply supported by her own detailed researches. Before the Second World War there were few overt complaints against doctors. Poor outcome of serious illness was common-place and people understood little of disease despite the insights offered by G B Shaw in ‘‘The Doctors ’ Dilemma’’. Doctors were treated with reverence—so much so that two doctors who successfully warded off what appeared to have been an indefensible claim were applauded by the vicar of East Dulwich as having had a wrong redressed: ‘‘The great sting of that wrong was that it was un-generous and ungrateful; circumstances that ought to have elicited gratitude were turned into grounds for accusation and attack’’.1 In 1947 the NHS was established with no structured procedure for complaints. Pro-fessor Mulcahy describes the subsequent developments starting with the Department of Health guidelines of 1966 that allowed complaints about doctors to be handled almost exclusively by doctors. This process was altered little by either the formal legalistic review of the Davies Committee (1973) or by the initiative of the MP Michael McNair Wilson who, after a bad experience in hospital, sought to develop a patients ’ char-ter. He made a dramatic speech in Parliament (‘‘Whose life? Whose body? Who suffers?’’), but the resultant Hospital Complaints Act (1985) had little effect. It took the impetus of the Citizens ’ Charter (1991) and pressure from both the charit