Abstract
The patient rights movement is as slow as a glacier, equally relentless at changing the landscape, but ultimately healthy. That it is not as organized and identifiable as other consumer movements is explained by the fact that when individuals are sick or injured, they are not themselves, and their first priority is to regain their health and their identity. F. Scott Fitzgerald perhaps put it best in his masterpiece of American fiction, The Great Gatsby: “[There is] no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.” Thus, sick and injured citizens often voluntarily relinquish rights they would otherwise vigorously assert in the hope that this will aid their recovery. In the words of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “There is nothing men will not do, there is nothing they have not done, to recover their health and save their lives.” He describes some of the extremes to which sick people have gone, including being half drowned, half cooked, seared with hot irons, and crimped with knives.
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Notes
O. W. Holmes, “The Young Practitioner,” in W. H. Davenport, ed., The Good Physician (New York: Macmillan, 1962), at 176. See also E. J. Cassell, The Healer’s Art (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), at 25–6.
Annas, The Hospital: A Human Rights Wasteland, 1(4) Civil Liberties Rev. 9(1974). See also C. B. Inlander, L. S. Levin & E. Weiner, Medicine on Trial (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1988).
G. J. Annas, Judging Medicine (Clifton, N.J.: Humana Press, 1988), at 2-3.
M. Konner, Becoming a Doctor (New York: Penguin, 1988), at 371.
G. J. Annas, L. H. Glantz & B. F. Katz, The Rights of Doctors, Nurses and Allied Health Professionals (Cambridge, Mass: Ballinger, 1981), at xiv–xvi.
J. Feinberg, Social Philosophy (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1973).
T. E. Holland, Elements of Jurisprudence, 12th ed. (London: Oxford U. Press, 1916).
Holmes, The Path of the Law, Harv. L. Rev. 457, 461(1897); and see L. L. Fuller, The Morality of Law (New Haven, Conn.: Yale U. Press, 1964), at 106-7.
See e.g., R. Fein, Medical Care, Medical Costs: The Search for a Health Insurance Policy (Boston, Mass.: Harvard U. Press, 1986); Himmelstein & Woolhandler, A National Health Program for the United States: A Physicians’ Proposal, 320 New Eng. J. Med. 102 (1989); Enthoven & Kronick, A Consumer-Choice Health Plan for the 1990s, 320 New Eng. J. Med. 29 (1989); Relman, Universal Health Insurance: Its Time Has Come, 320 New Eng. J. Med. 117 (1989); and National Leadership Commission on Health Care, For the Health of the Nation (Washington, DC: NLCHC, 1989).
These characteristics are discussed in more detail in Annas, Medical Remedies and Human Rights: Why Civil Rights Lawyers Must Become Involved in Medical Decision-Making, 2 Human Rts. 151, 156–64 (1972).
See Annas & Healey, The Patient Rights Advocate: Redefining the Doctor-Patient Relationship in the Hospital Context, 27 Vand. L. Rev. 243 (1974). For critical comment, see Margolis, Conceptual Aspects of a Patients’ Bill of Rights, 11 J. Value Inquiry 126 (1977). For a summary of competing theories of law, see M. Kelman, A Guide to Critical Legal Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press, 1987).
See ch. VI, “Informed Consent,” for a detailed discussion of this trend. See also Leenen, Patients’ Rights in Europe, 8 Health Policy 33 (1987); and President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedicai and Behavioral Research, Making Health Care Decisions (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1982).
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© 1992 George J. Annas and the American Civil Liberties Union
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Annas, G.J. (1992). The Patient Rights Movement. In: The Rights of Patients. Humana Press, Totowa, NJ. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-0397-1_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-0397-1_1
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