Abstract

Some new ideas in medicine are unorthodox, maverick and extraordinary. Some of these will turn out to be wrong and be abandoned, while others will turn out to be right and will change the way we understand entire medical fields. Some will result in harm to patients and some will benefit millions of people. How can we tell the difference between a hero to be, like Barry Marshal or Robin Warren, and a scoundrel to be, like Andrew Wakefield? This paper rejects some possible ways of making this distinction before concluding with a positive suggestion. I argue that we should make use of an Aristotelian account of assessing the reasonableness of the decision to take a risk. This account is uniquely suited to medical research and allows us to distinguish between heroes and scoundrels even before we see the full consequences of their research.