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"Richard Nisbett's Privacy and Yours"
Max Cavitch, Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania
June 2, 2005

Richard Nisbett — lawyer, slavery apologist, and poet — suffered a mental breakdown and was admitted to the Pennsylvania Hospital in 1800, where he remained until his death in 1823.  During his confinement, Nisbett wrote long poems and painted elaborate watercolor illustrations of his imaginary travels throughout the world.  In them, he maps routes of freedom, while also searching eccentrically for his own sanity.  His confinement in Philadelphia enabled a carceral career of interior exploration that yielded a remarkable corpus of words and images — the occasion for my broader consideration of the forms of affinity and separation that characterized eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America and its views of and by the mad.  They are also the occasion for my analysis of the consequences for historical research of some new provisions of the 1996 federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), enacted in April 2003.  These new provisions — which, confusingly, restrict certain kinds of access to health information while at the same time undermining patients’ control of that information — obscure the distinction between the privacy rights of Richard Nisbett, who died two centuries ago, and those of you or me living today.  The new “privacy rule” has a double effect: it impedes research on early American health and medicine, and it raises provocative questions about privacy and its history.  My essay takes up these questions with an eye to Nisbett’s situation and our own.  I argue that, as an obstacle to looking at the past, the privacy rule concentrates longstanding ambivalence about self-disclosure and the public interest.  The story of Richard Nisbett’s privacy helps me to interpret the history of that ambivalence and to suggest ways of inviting our own posthumous futures.