The empowered patient, skeptical of professional authority, is not a new phenomenon: he was actually created by the American Revolution.
Reading through historian Gordon Wood’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, I came across a passage describing how national independence from the British led to an independent turn of mind in other spheres. Wood writes that Charles Nisbet, president of Pennsylvania’s Dickinson College, complained as early as 1789 that Americans were carrying their reliance on individual judgment to ridiculous extremes. He fully expected, he said, to see soon such books as “Every Man his own Lawyer,” “Every Man his own Physician,” and “Every Man his own Clergyman and Confessor.”
In fact, New York’s Medical Repository wrote in 1817 of a shortage of “professional pharmacists” at a time when they did drug-mixing and diagnostic duties. But while the Repository acknowledged the lack of professionalism might lead to some mistakes, it continued that “these mistakes would be no more than occurred in Paris, London or Edinburgh, ‘where pharmacy, as a profession, is scientific, exclusive and privileged,’” writes Wood. (Emphasis in original) What a remarkable attitude!
Around this same time, the word “statisticks” appeared for the first time in American dictionaries. However, in America, there was a growing opinion that facts could speak for themselves without expert interpretation. As one popular journal put it in 1811, “The reflections arising out of [the facts] should be left to the reader.”
Like the hero in an old-time movie, Chief Justice John Roberts metaphorically untied Obamacare from the railroad tracks and, with four of his colleagues, pulled it away from the onrushing destructive force of his right-wing colleagues in the nick of time. In doing so he also saved President Obama from political disaster.
“We are now contemplating, Heaven save the mark, a bill that would tax the well for the benefit of the ill.”
