Jay Katz papers

Jacob "Jay" Katz was born on October 20, 1922, in Zwickau, Germany, where his father was a business owner. When Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, Katz's family's German citizenship was revoked. His father arranged for him to obtain a Czech passport, and at age sixteen, Katz traveled alone to Prague, and ultimately to the United States by way of Italy and Great Britain. The rest of his family joined him in the United States in 1940.

Katz graduated from the University of Vermont in 1944, and in 1949 he earned his medical degree from Harvard Medical School. Following his education, Dr. Katz completed his internship and residency in New York City, and then enlisted in the United States Air Force, serving as a First Lieutenant and Captain at the Maxwell Air Force Base hospital in Montgomery, Alabama.

Katz's career at Yale University began in 1953 when he was appointed Chief Resident at the Yale School of Medicine's outpatient clinic. He began teaching psychiatry at Yale in 1955, and in 1958 was named Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Law at Yale. Dr. Katz's work in the areas of medical law and bioethics began when he served on a committee that drafted the Connecticut law that established the terms of patient privilege for psychotherapists and their patients in 1961. This law served as a model for the Federal Rules of Evidence, which are enforced across the United States.

In 1972, Katz was named to serve on a federal committee charged to investigate the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, begun in 1932 to study the progression and effects of untreated syphilis in about 400 impoverished African-American men from rural Alabama. The infected men were never told that they had syphilis, and were never treated for it, though they were compensated for their participation in the study with free health care, meals, and burial insurance. The committee concluded that the experiment was unethical, that the participants should have been treated for their infections, and called for greater governmental oversight and protection of subjects in medical studies.

In 1994, Katz was appointed to serve on the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, charged by President Bill Clinton to investigate 30 experiments in which individuals were unknowingly exposed to radiation. Katz was active on a number of other bioethics issues, as an outspoken proponent of the concept of informed consent, and as an opponent of the use of data gathered during Nazi medical experiments.

Katz was the prolific author of six books and numerous articles, and wrote extensively on topics related to the relationship between medicine, ethics, and law. He died on November 17, 2008, at the age of eighty-six at his home in New Haven, Connecticut.