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Orthodoxy And 'The Other Man's Doxy': Medical Licensing And Medical Freedom In The Gilded Age, Lewis Grossman

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This is a draft of Chapter Two of my book-in-progress under contract with Oxford University Press titled You Can Choose Your Medicine: Freedom of Therapeutic Choice in American History and Law. This chapter shows how freedom of therapeutic choice remained an influential theme in American policy and thought in the Gilded Age. Despite the almost universal restoration of medical licensing after the Civil War, the new licensing regimes were drafted and enforced in ways that protected the rights of practitioners and patients of nonorthodox schools of medicine.This chapter starts by briefly describing the main alternative medical sects during the Gilded …

The Origins Of American Health Libertarianism, Lewis A. Grossman

Lewis A. Grossman

This Article examines the persistent American demand for freedom of therapeutic choice as a popular constitutional movement originating in the nation’s earliest years. It also shows how multiple concepts of freedom, in addition to bodily freedom, have contributed to the concept of a constitutional right to medical liberty.

There is a deep current of belief in the United States that people have a right to choose their preferred treatments without government interference. Cries of “Death Panels” are routinely directed against health care reform proposals that might limit patients’ access to medical products and procedures. FDA is furiously attacked, on freedom …