"This is a brilliant work of lasting value to both sociology and anthropology by a person combining the talent of keen observer with the highest level of theoretical sophistication. . . a major contribution to our understanding of the nature and structure of a significant social situation."--David M. Schneider, The University of Chicago. Experiment Perilous covers a three-year period In the lives of the patients and physicians in a small and intense hospital community. It represents a pioneering, participant-observation-based study of a hospital ward as a social system. In a new epilogue. Fox provides a historical and sociological account of phenomena relevant to clinical investigations that she has observed in her forty-five years as a sociologist of medicine.