Special Supplement: Ethical and Policy Issues in Rehabilitation Medicine

The field of medical rehabilitation is relatively new, a product in great part of the rapid developments in medical science during and after the Second World War. Until recently, the ethical problems of this new field were neglected. There seemed to be more pressing concerns as rehabilitation medicine struggled to establish itself, somtimes in the face of considerable skepticism or hostility. There also seemed no pressing moral questions of the kind and intensity to be encountered, say, in high technology acute care medicine or genetic engineering. With eyes focused on the dramatic and wrenching problems, those in biomedical ethics could and did easily overlook the quiet, less obtrusive, issues of rehabilitation.