Codification and the Origins of Physician-Patient Privilege

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-102
Author(s):  
MILES WILKINSON
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Medical Profession ◽  
The United States ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Professional Status ◽  
Rapid Spread ◽  
American Law ◽  
Judicial Proceedings ◽  
Physician Patient

Abstract:This essay examines the origins of physician-patient privilege in the United States. It concentrates an 1828 New York law that protected medical confidentiality in the courtroom—the first statutory guarantee of physician-patient privilege—as well as the rapid spread of privilege statutes throughout the nineteenth century. Using the published notes of the authors of New York’s influential statute alongside other primary sources, I argue that these early statutes are best explained as the result of nineteenth-century efforts to codify American law. The medical profession took little note of physician-patient privilege until much later, indicating that privilege emerged not as a protection of doctors’ professional status, nor as a means of protecting patients in the courtroom, but rather as an inadvertent offshoot of attempts to streamline and simply judicial proceedings. It is perhaps because of these unsystematic origins that physician-patient privilege still remains such an unevenly applied rule in American courtrooms.

scholarly journals Collections, Compilations, and Convolutes of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscript Fragments in North America before ca. 1900

Fragmentology ◽  
10.24446/dlll ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 73-139
Author(s):  
Scott Gwara
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
North America ◽  
The United States ◽  
New York University ◽  
Historical Society ◽  
Cornell University ◽  
Private Collections ◽  
Public Exhibition

Using evidence drawn from S. de Ricci and W. J. Wilson’s Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada, American auction records, private library catalogues, public exhibition catalogues, and manuscript fragments surviving in American institutional libraries, this article documents nineteenth-century collections of medieval and Renaissance manuscript fragments in North America before ca. 1900. Surprisingly few fragments can be identified, and most of the private collections have disappeared. The manuscript constituents are found in multiple private libraries, two universities (New York University and Cornell University), and one Learned Society (Massachusetts Historical Society). The fragment collections reflect the collecting genres documented in England in the same period, including albums of discrete fragments, grangerized books, and individual miniatures or “cuttings” (sometimes framed). A distinction is drawn between undecorated text fragments and illuminated ones, explained by aesthetic and scholarly collecting motivations. An interest in text fragments, often from binding waste, can be documented from the 1880s.

The English diaspora in North America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanja Bueltmann ◽  
Donald M. MacRaild
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
North America ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigrant Community ◽  
Mutual Aid ◽  
The Us ◽  
Transnational Communication ◽  
The Uk

From the early eighteenth century, a vibrant English associational culture emerged that was, by many measures, ethnic in character. English ethnic organisations spread across North America from east to west, and from north to south, later becoming a truly global phenomenon when reaching Australasia in the later nineteenth century. This books charts the nature, extent and character of these developments. It explores the main activities of English ethnic societies, including their charitable work; collective mutual aid; their national celebration; their expressions of imperial and monarchical devotion; and the extent to which they evinced transnational communication with the homeland and with English immigrants in other territories. The English demonstrated and English people abroad demonstrated and experienced competitive and sometimes conflictual ethnic character, and so the discussion also uncovers aspects of enmity towards an Irish immigrant community, especially in the US, whose increasingly political sense of community brought them into bitter dispute with English immigrants whom they soon outnumbered. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the extent of English ethnic associational culture in North America was such that it resonated within England herself, resulting in the formation of a central organization designed to coordinate the promotion of English culture. This was the Royal Society of St George. Ultimately, the book documents that the English expressed their identity through processes of associating, mutualism and self-expression that were, by any measure, both ethnic and diasporic in character. The English Diaspora is based on a very large amount of untapped primary materials from archives in the United States, Canada, and the UK relating to specific locations such as New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Toronto, Ottawa, and Kingston, and London. Thousands of newspaper articles have been trawled. Several long runs of English associational periodicals have been garnered and utilized. Comparative and transnational perspectives beyond the US and Canada are enabled by the discovery of manuscript materials and periodicals relating to the Royal Society of St George.

The Changing Role of Foreign Money in the United States, 1782–1857

1977 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 1009-1027 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Martin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Currency ◽  
Legal Tender ◽  
Silver Standard ◽  
Changing Role ◽  
The U.S

Foreign money remained in widespread use in the United States until the middle of the nineteenth century. Several foreign coins were provided legal tender status in order to supplement the scanty American specie supply. A particular disadvantage was the perpetuation of non-decimal units of account, especially in New York. When the U.S. enacted a subsidiary silver standard in 1853, the expedient bases for the lawful status of foreign coin was removed. In 1857, the United States coinage was finally reformed to secure an exclusive national currency.

scholarly journals THE 1951 DIPLOMATIC GIFT: THE ROLE OF A GERMAN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY HANUKKAH LAMP IN ISRAELI-AMERICAN RELATIONS

ARTis ON ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 67-77
Author(s):  
Shir Kochavi
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
The Gift ◽  
History Of

A diplomatic gift in the form of a Hanukkah Lamp, given to President Harry Truman by the Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion in 1951 was selected for this occasion by museum personnel from the Bezalel Museum in Jerusalem and the Jewish Museum in New York. Based on primary sources found in archives in Israel and in the United States, this case study investigates the process of objects exchange between two museums, orchestrated on the basis of an existing collegial relationship, and illustrates how the Hanukkah Lamp becomes more than itself and signifies both the history of the Jewish people and the mutual obligations between the two nations. Drawing on the theories of Marcel Mauss, Arjun Appadurai, and Igor Kopytoff on the notion of the gift, the article highlights the layers of meanings attributed to a gifted object.

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