The essays which constitute the present volume tend to raise and clarify issues from the perspectives of the physician, the biomedical researcher and even the technologist and technocrat. Problems made thematic when turning, as this volume does, to the moral uses of new knowledge in the biomedical sciences, fail to be adequately raised, however, if we ignore the patient's perspective. It may prove useful, prior to construing persons as patients (a particular social role we should be reminded), to draw a sketch of our contemporary social world, not one depicted through the sociologist's categories and jargon, but one penned by the philosopher's hand which takes its point of departure from the patient's scientifically naive standpoint.