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A colleague has sent me a copy of your recent paper1 (http://www.nzma.org.nz/ journal/115-1162/181/). I write to express praise and sympathy in equal measure.
I retired in 1988 after more than 20 years on the staff of Green Lane Hospital. Until then, we had been lucky in that nobody lectured us on our duty to provide relevant explanations to our patients. We just gave them as a natural part of our job, and I can't recall any complaints. 'Informed consent' was discovered, in the Cartwright Report, as a considerable novelty; to us it was rather old hat. I had been keenly interested in medical ethics since 1960; I was...