Ethics by Committee

“In Ethics by Committee: A History of Reasoning Together about Medicine, Science, Society, and the State the historian Noortje Jacobs charts the Dutch contribution to the emergence of our contemporary international regime of ethical regulation in which governmental committees have tried and often failed to regulate and implement ethical research reviews … Jacobs’s skill as a writer is clear in her ability to guide the reader through the administrative labyrinth of late twentieth-century Dutch science governance while always relating this back to national debates in the medical and popular press.” * Isis *
“Jacobs’ history of the Dutch research ethics committees is an impressive, conceptually aware discussion of policy debates, a socio-political analysis with focus on institutions, committees and public discourses…” * Low Countries Historical Review *
“An important new contribution to the history of bioethics and research ethics. Jacobs does more than simply fill a historiographical gap: the focus on the Netherlands allows her to convincingly argue that bioethics and research ethics do not have a singular history, and that we need to examine the historically specific interplay between medicine, society, and the state if we want to explain developments in specific times and places. Her insights and conclusions significantly add to our understanding of the mechanisms and schools of thought in medicine, philosophy, and politics that caused research ethics and bioethics more broadly to become global phenomena in recent decades.” – Duncan Wilson, University of Manchester

Noortje Jacobs is a historian in the Department of Medical Ethics, Philosophy, and History of Medicine at the Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

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