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5 hours ago

How The Patient Rights Revolution Builds on America’s 1776 One

By MICHAEL MILLENSON It took 129 years for the inalienable rights proclaimed in America’s Declaration of Independence to apply to the rights of patients in relationship to their doctors. In 1905, an Illinois appellate court ruled in favor of a woman who’d sued her surgeon for performing a hysterectomy without disclosing in advance what procedure he was doing. The court declared in what became one of the foundational principles of informed consent that “under a free government,” all citizens had the right to know what a doctor planned to do to their body before he did it, no matter ho...