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In November 1994 what had become known as the Libby Zion case came to trial in New York City after ten years of legal wrangling. The events at the heart of the trial took place on 4 and 5 March 1984. Libby Zion was admitted to the Emergency Room of New York Hospital with a fever and in an agitated state. She died early the next morning. Following her death, Ms. Zion's father, Sidney Zion, filed suit against the hospital as well as four doctors for wrongful death and pain and suffering. He sought punitive damages. Attorneys for the Zion family argued that physicians departed from accepted medical practice in their treatment of Ms. Zion, most egregiously by prescribing Demerol after they had been told that the patient was taking the anti-depressant Nardil, despite the fact that the Physicians' Desk Reference warns against mixing the two medications. Attorneys for the physicians and New York Hospital argued that the doctors acted according to accepted medical practice. They contended that Ms. Zion's death occurred not as a result of the Demerol-Nardil interaction but as a result of other drug interactions, either between Demerol and another prescription drug she had not informed hospital personnel she was taking or between Demerol and cocaine.
In February 1995, the jury reached a mixed verdict, which seemed a crushing blow to the Zion family and a minor victory to the physicians involved. The case was extensively covered in the media, and, within the next several months, two hour-long television documentaries examined the civil proceedings. The first of these, a Court TV Trial Story episode, "Deadly Dosage: Who's at Fault?," depicts Libby Zion as a tragic heroine, surrounded by devoted family members and entrusted to an overburdened team of medical personnel who are depicted as self-involved and callous. 1 On the other hand, "A Father's Story," which aired on NBC's prime-time newsmagazine Dateline a few weeks later, provides a far more complex-but perhaps even more emotional-version of the case. It portrays the medical professionals at New York Hospital more sympathetically and includes facts that were not introduced as evidence during the trial. 2 These two programs reach quite different conclusions about the responsibilities of physicians and their patients. Taken together, they dramatically illustrate...