Choose Your Medicine

In Choose Your Medicine, Lewis A. Grossman examines the concept of freedom of therapeutic choice in the United States. He presents a compelling look at how persistent but evolving notions of a right to therapeutic choice have affected American policy and law from the Revolution through the Trump Era. The book is filled with vivid descriptions of activists and lawyers resisting a variety of government limits on therapeutic choice, including medical licensing statutes, FDA bans on unapproved drugs and alternative remedies, abortion restrictions, and prohibitions against medical marijuana and physician-assisted suicide. He further considers the widespread opposition to state-compelled health measures like vaccines and face masks.

Lewis A. Grossman is Professor of Law and Affiliate Professor of History at American University, where he has taught since 1997. He has also been a Law and Public Affairs (LAPA) Fellow at Princeton University and a Visiting Professor at Cornell Law School. Prior to joining the American University faculty, he was an associate at Covington & Burling LLP, and before that he clerked for Chief Judge Abner Mikva of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Professor Grossman's scholarship has appeared in the American Journal of Law and Medicine, Cornell Law Review, Law and History Review, Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law & Ethics, and Administrative Law Review, among others. He is the co-author of Food and Drug Law: Cases and Materials, the leading text in the field.

Introduction
1. Storming the Bastille of Orthodoxy: The Origins of American Health Libertarianism
2. "The Blood-Bought Freedom of Our Venerable Sires": The Antebellum Battle for Medical Freedom
3. Orthodoxy and "The Other Man's Doxy": Medical Licensing and Medical Freedom in the Gilded Age
4. Reining in Progressive "State Medicine"
5. Conspiracy Theorists and Con Men: Freedom of Therapeutic Choice in the "Golden Age" of Medicine
6. The Spirit of the '70s: Vitamins, Yogurt, and Apricot Pits
7. AIDS Activists, FDA Regulation, and the Amendment of America's Drug Constitution
8. Modern Resistance to Orthodox Medical Domination
9. Life, Liberty, [and the Pursuit of Happiness]: The Long Struggle for Legalization of Medical Marijuana
10. The Right to be Covered: Therapeutic Choice and Health Insurance
11. The End: Freedom to Choose and the Right to Die
Notes
Index