A permanent institution that documents the institutional record on paternalism in medicine and adjacent domains, organized around a single argument.
Paternalism is the systematic restriction of a person's authority over information, decisions, or actions affecting their own life, undertaken in the name of their protection. This museum was founded on the premise that paternalism is not a single argument but a recognizable institutional pattern with a recognizable grammar.
The pattern recurs across domains, across decades, and across technologies. The vocabulary updates. The premise does not. The same posture that produced the warnings against patient communities in the 1990s produces the bills against patient AI in 2026. The same posture that justified the cease-and-desist against direct-to-consumer genetic testing in 2013 now justifies the disqualification of patient-facing clinical decision support in 2026. The artifacts change. The artifact-makers know what they are doing only some of the time.
Each wing collects one population, one domain, or one inversion. The wall labels are not neutral. They were not written by the people who produced the artifacts on display. The visitor is invited to verify, contest, or extend the reading. Acquisitions are ongoing.
Four wings document instances of the pattern. The fifth is the inversion. The order, broadest to narrowest, ends where the museum's argument lands.
The general medical paternalism that does not require the patient to be female, disabled, or neurodivergent for the dismissal to occur. The baseline the other wings extend.
Expected opening: Autumn 2026.
Read the Wing's Brief →Misogyny as the specific intensifier on the medical baseline. The wing carrying the museum's longest historical reach, from the wandering womb to the contemporary dismissal of women's sleep, pain, and reproductive authority.
Open. The first wing to land.
Enter the Wing →The right to one's own mental and cognitive interpretation. The wing where the diagnostic label is the speech act and the speech act is the harm. The wing most actively soliciting acquisitions from inside the communities it documents.
Expected opening: Autumn 2026.
Read the Wing's Brief →Paternalism as it is being newly constructed in real time. Twenty-four artifacts of the institutional record on patients, AI, and the question of who is allowed to know. Editorials, state bills, hospital memos, FDA letters, and the language of caution that survives every new technology.
Open. The first wing to land.
Enter the Wing →The Museum of Paternalism is curated by Gilles Frydman, founder of ACOR in 1995 and co-founder of the Society for Participatory Medicine, with three and a half decades of work in patient communities and patient-directed care. The museum is, in part, the structured form of an argument he has been making across that entire span.
The museum is a project of Gilles Frydman, the developer of the CLAIM framework for safe and competent patient-AI collaboration. The curator welcomes correspondence. The museum does not currently solicit donations.
The collection is open. Editorials, bills, hospital notices, conference statements, professional society position papers, podcast transcripts, FDA letters, IRB protocols, and other artifacts of the institutional record may be submitted for consideration.
Provenance required. The museum does not display secondhand reports of an artifact. Acquisitions are evaluated against three criteria: the artifact must be real, the institutional position must be representative rather than fringe, and the wall label must be defensible against a charitable reading of the source. Curatorial discretion final.