2 - Commentary on Schloendorff v. Society of New York Hospital

Summary

Schloendorff v. Society of New York Hospitals is a 1914 New York Court of Appeals decision frequently cited as the foundational case establishing a patient’s common-law right to bodily autonomy. But Judge Benjamin Cardozo’s assertion that “every human being of adult years and sound mind has a right to determine what shall be done with his own body” was mere dicta. In affirming a directed verdict for the hospital where the plaintiff’s uterus was removed without her consent, Cardozo deemed a nurse’s awareness of the patient’s objection to surgery insufficient to put the hospital on notice that an independent-contractor surgeon was planning a non-consensual hysterectomy. In her feminist judgment, Professor Kelly Dineen unearths a treasure trove of contemporaneous sources that establish the nursing function as an independent basis for duties to patients for which the hospital may be held vicariously liable. In her commentary, Professor Danielle Pelfrey Duryea situates the case within the emergence of “modern nursing” as a devalued feminine counterpart to masculine, valorized “modern medicine."