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Podcast: New Books in Medicine
Episode: Alexander Zaitchik, "Owning the Sun: A People's History of Monopoly Medicine from Aspirin to COVID-19 Vaccines" (Counterpoint, 2022)
Description: Although the dividing line between private life and public responsibilities can never be definite and clear, there is a moral threshold which is crossed both by those who assume power to change the lives of many men through public action and by those who undertake to represent in a public role the will and interests of many other men. A new responsibility, and even a new kind of responsibility, and new moral conflicts, present themselves.– Stuart Hampshire, foreword to Public and Private Morality (1978)Hampshire’s thoughts help articulate the inherent tensions underlying an institutionalized system of mon...