Imagine that you are a country doctor with an idea for an experiment. Your only difficulty is finding a suitable person to experiment on. This obstacle faces all would-be investigators in this field: willing human guinea-pigs are hard to come by. But a neighbour of yours owns his own business, and one of his employees - Phipps - has a healthy eight-year-old son called James. You ask this boy's father if you can experiment on his son. The father agrees. After all, you are a respected figure.

LRB 8 October 1992 | PDF Download