Jewish Religious Law as a Model of the Patient-Physician Relationship: A Comment on Professor Brody’s Essay

Abstract

My comments on Professor Brody’s stimulating and provocative paper will not deal either with his sketch of the ‘commercial contract’ model of the patient-physician relation, or with the common-law treatment of this relation, a treatment that, according to Brody, “is captured by” the commercial contract model. This is not my assignment. Neither will I be concerned with any systematic, critical assessment of what Professor Brody calls the ‘status model’ of physician-patient relations. What I wish to examine is whether and to what extent the ‘status model’ in fact “captures the treatment of the relation in Judaic Law,” as Brody claims, or fails to do so. The other principal objective of this commentary will be to amplify Brody’s penetrating account of the ethics of physician-patient realtions in Jewish law, where such amplification seems needed, and also to comment briefly on the societal values and principles that are both assumed and implied by a full understanding of these relations.