:This essay examines the origins of physician-patient privilege in the United States. It concentrates an 1828 New York law that protected medical confidentiality in the courtroom—the first statutory guarantee of physician-patient privilege—as well as the rapid spread of privilege statutes throughout the nineteenth century. Using the published notes of the authors of New York’s influential statute alongside other primary sources, I argue that these early statutes are best explained as the result of nineteenth-century efforts to codify American law. The medical profession took little note of physician-patient privilege until much later, indicating that privilege emerged not as a protection of doctors’ professional status, nor as a means of protecting patients in the courtroom, but rather as an inadvertent offshoot of attempts to streamline and simply judicial proceedings. It is perhaps because of these unsystematic origins that physician-patient privilege still remains such an unevenly applied rule in American courtrooms.

中文翻译：

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医患特权的编纂和起源

: 本文探讨了美国医患特权的起源。它集中了 1828 年的纽约法律，该法律保护法庭的医疗机密——医患特权的第一个法定保障——以及特权法规在整个 19 世纪的迅速传播。使用纽约有影响力的法规的作者发表的笔记以及其他主要来源，我认为这些早期法规最好解释为 19 世纪编纂美国法律的努力的结果。直到很久以后，医学界才注意到医患特权，这表明特权的出现既不是对医生专业地位的保护，也不是在法庭上保护患者的一种手段，而是作为简化司法程序的尝试的无意分支。或许正是由于这些不系统的起源，医患特权在美国法庭上仍然是一个应用如此不均衡的规则。