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.