Zion finally managed to fall asleep, but by 6:30, her temperature was 107 ☏ (42 ☌). She also prescribed haloperidol by phone to control the agitation. After being contacted by nurses by phone, Weinstein ordered medical restraints be placed on Zion. Zion, however, did not improve, and continued to become more agitated. Luise Weinstein went to cover other patients, and Stone went to sleep in an on-call room in an adjacent building. Weinstein and Stone were both responsible for covering dozens of other patients. Sherman, the two prescribed pethidine (meperidine) to control the 'strange jerking motions' that Zion had been exhibiting when she was admitted.

Weinstein, a first-year resident physician (also referred to as intern or PGY-1), and Stone, a PGY-2 resident, were unable to determine the cause of Zion's illness, though Stone tentatively suggested that her condition might be a simple overreaction to a normal illness. Zion was assigned to two residents, Luise Weinstein and Gregg Stone, who both evaluated her. Raymond Sherman, the Zion family physician, agreed with their plan to hydrate and observe her. Libby Zion had been admitted to the hospital through the emergency room by the resident physician assigned to the ER on the night of March 4. The article stated that after being admitted to New York Hospital, she died of cardiac arrest, the cause of which was not known.

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. She was the daughter of Sidney Zion, a lawyer who had been a writer for The New York Times. A hospital autopsy revealed traces of cocaine, but other later tests showed no traces. She took a prescribed antidepressant, phenelzine, daily. Libby Zion (November 1965 – March 5, 1984) was a freshman at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont. 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. Īlthough 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. In July 2003, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education adopted similar regulations for all accredited medical training institutions in the United States. The law was named after Libby Zion, who died in 1984 at the age of 18 under the care of what her father believed to be overworked resident physicians and intern physicians. 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.

Doctors in training are dying