When it comes to university student speech, why isn’t the answer that student groups can take whatever positions they want (even if ridiculous or offensive) and the school doesn’t have to take a position on that because it’s just a group of students speaking, not the university?

Me, every single day for the next two years:

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Medicine in 2023: You should get a vaccine, maybe. If you want. Up to you. Medicine in 1961: I know what's best for you, so I took out all your teeth. Go deal with that.

Always funny to run into stuff from that early period in the development of informed consent. Take this example, from a 1961 case of a woman who had all of her remaining teeth removed against her will.

One of the ironies of my university mandating that we drop textbooks is that the students will likely now be required to read much, much more. With little time to prepare a highly curated experience, most of them will have to read lots of primary source articles, for example.

I finally found a really impressive open access textbook for health law. Success! The only problem with it is that it is UK law.

As far as I can tell, the first health law ever adopted in the colonies that became the US was a law regarding who would pay for indigent care. The second law, passed some years later, was for medical malpractice and consent. So if you ever wondered where the priorities were...

Feeling this in my bones right now. I’ve never been more overwhelmed with information than being told carve a whole new curriculum out of my field without the use of a textbook.

As far as actually writing the body of the work, all I've got so far is a title page, six pages of author's notes, and an index. But we all have to start somewhere.

I'm starting a plan of attack to take taxation out of my curriculum and add insurance. Since that's outside the scope of my top-level outline, I'm also starting an outline for what I'm calling "Section X," for chapters that I probably don't have time to finish before Fall 2024.

Of course, I also work at a university that has had deep cuts to library services in the last year. So my glorious file management system is going to go sideways as soon as I have to start getting physical books and articles out from the library starting next week.

Thank god for software, btw. I don't know how anyone managed to write a book when you actually had paper copies of everything laying about. 231 items in the citations folder so far, and this is just the start.

That's as far as I've gotten with chapter 1. I'm midway through a first pass on chapter 2.

And then legal procedure. We have a non-law audience, so a lot of this tends to be confusing to them. It's also unstoppable if you want them to understand anything that comes after, which can be frustrating for both student and teacher.

Aaaand the boring stuff. One thing I never loved about the book I taught out of before was how little it paid attention to admin tribunals - licensing should be important to these kids! I'm going to make an effort to add a lot more on that angle here.

I'll catch flack from the really smart people about some things on this page, but it is what it is.

That 20th century section is ROUGH. Sometimes it feels like events are accelerating as we near the present, when really I think we are just being more granular because we don't yet know which events were really important in the long run.

Keep in mind, I'm a week and a half out from finding out that I can't keep using a textbook for my courses, so this is all very rough. Adding specific sources and fleshing out claims is going to take the bulk of the time, and this is just an outline.

Chapter 1 obviously leaning heavily on public health and vaccine history, but it's hot right now, and frankly it's my favorite hobby horse.