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The Emerging Stowaway: Patients' Rights in the 1980s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2021

George J. Annas
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Extract

At one point in Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Pym, who has stowed away in the hold of a whaling vessel, believes he has been abandoned and that the hold will be his tomb. He expressed sensations of “extreme horror and dismay,” and “the most gloomy imagining, in which the dreadful deaths of thirst, famine, suffocation, and premature interment, crowded in as the prominent disasters to be encountered.”

It is probably uncommon for hospitalized patients to feel as gloomy as Pym. Nevertheless, installed in a strange institution, separated from friends and family, forced to wear a degrading costume, confined to bed, and attended to by a variety of strangers who may or may not keep the patient informed of what they are doing, the average patient is intimidated and disoriented. Such an environment encourages dependence and discourages the assertion of individual rights.

As the physician-director of Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital has warned: “today’s hospital stands increasingly to become a jungle, whose pathways to the uninitiated are poorly marked and fraught with danger. . . .”

Type
Article
Information
Law, Medicine and Healthcare , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , February 1982 , pp. 32 - 46
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 1982

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References

Rabkin, M., quoted in Annas, G.J., The Hospital: A Patient Rights Wasteland. Civil Liberties Review (Fall 1974) at 11.Google Scholar
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Examples of patient abuse based on providers’ misunderstanding of the law after the Saikewicz case in Massachusetts are cited in Annas, G.J., Reconciling Quinlan and Saikewicz: Decision Making for the Terminally Ill Incompetent, American Journal of Law & Medicine 4(4):367, 387 (Winter 1979).Google ScholarPubMed
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