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Edited by Chris Beyrer and H. F. Pizer
470 pp, $65
Baltimore, MD, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007
ISBN-13: 978-0-8018-8647-8

JAMA. 2008;299(13):1609-1610.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Human rights and international law have been significant issues in moral and political philosophy since 1795, when Immanuel Kant published "Toward Perpetual Peace." At about the same time, however, the ethics of medicine and public health began to be segregated from mainstream moral and political philosophy. In each subsequent generation, a few physicians publicly deplored widespread sickness and death as a result of war, political turmoil, or famine. In the mid-19th century, for example, Rudolf Virchow, a Prussian pathologist and politician, investigated and proposed policy to relieve the suffering of weavers in the disputed multiethnic region of Silesia. Virchow insisted that physicians should be "attorneys for the poor." A group of US and Soviet physicians received the Nobel Peace Prize for promoting the control of nuclear arms.

The editors of this book and the 39 colleagues they enlisted as authors propose to "operationaliz[e] rights-based approaches to public health" (p 5). . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Daniel M. Fox, PhD, Reviewer
Milbank Memorial Fund
New York, NY
dmfox@milbank.org