Libby Zion

New York State Department of Health Code, Section 405, also known as the Libby Zion Law, is a regulation that limits the amount of resident physicians' work in New York State hospitals to roughly 80 hours per week. The law was named after Libby Zion, who died at the age of 18 under the care of what her father believed to be overworked resident physicians and intern physicians. In July 2003, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education adopted similar regulations for all accredited medical training institutions in the United States.

Although regulatory and civil proceedings found conflicting evidence about Zion's death, today her death is widely believed to have been caused by serotonin syndrome from the drug interaction between the phenelzine she was taking prior to her hospital visit, and the pethidine administered by a resident physician. The lawsuits and regulatory investigations following her death, and their implications for working conditions and supervision of interns and residents were highly publicized in both lay media and medical journals.

Libby Zion (November 30, 1965 – March 5, 1984) was a freshman at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont. She took a prescribed antidepressant, phenelzine, daily. A hospital autopsy revealed traces of cocaine, but other later tests showed no traces. She was the daughter of Sidney Zion, a lawyer who had been a writer for The New York Times, and Elsa, a former publishing executive. She had two brothers, Adam and Jed. Her obituary in The New York Times, written the day after her death, stated that she had been ill with a "flu-like ailment" for the past several days. The article stated that after being admitted to New York Hospital, she died of cardiac arrest, the cause of which was not known.

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