N Engl J Med. 2012 Aug 2;367(5):445-50.
Doctors, patients, and lawyers--two centuries of health law.
Source
Department of Health Law, Bioethics, and Human Rights, Boston University School of Public Health, Boston, MA 02118, USA. annasgj@bu.edu
"Medical care in 2012 is unrecognizable as compared with what it was in 1812, and no 19th-century physician would be at home in a modern hospital. A 19th-century lawyer, however, would be completely at home in a contemporary courtroom, as would a present-day lawyer transported back to the early 19th century. Although slavery was still legal and women did not yet have the right to vote, the U.S. Supreme Court was the highest court in the land and the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights would be familiar, as would the jury and the common law system adopted from England.
Physicians and lawyers did not necessarily get along better in 1812 than they do today, primarily because of medical malpractice litigation. Herman Melville's 1851 metaphoric Massachusetts masterpiece, Moby-Dick, symbolizes the view of many physicians, then and now, that medical malpractice litigation is the white whale: evil, ubiquitous, and seemingly immortal (Figure 1
). Medicine and law were nonetheless often viewed as the two major professions, and for the leading physicians at that time, including Walter Channing (Figure 2
), editor-in-chief from 1825 to 1835 of what is now the New England Journal of Medicine, the relationship between medicine and law was of great intellectual and practical interest.1"
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