A text-book of medical jurisprudence and toxicology / by John Glaister.

  • John Glaister
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A text-book of medical jurisprudence and toxicology / by John Glaister. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    they were bound to divulge it. To whom ? To the Public Prosecutor ! If a poor, wretched woman committed an ofience for the purpose of getting rid of that with which she was pregnant, and of saving her character, her reputation, and, it might be, her very means of liveli- hood, and if a doctor was called in to assist her—not in procuring abortion, for that in itself was a crime—^but called in for the purpose of attending her and giving her medical advice—how she might be cured so as to go forth about her business—he doubted very, very, very much whether he would be justified in going forth and saying to the Public Prosecutor, ' I have been attending a poor young woman who has been trying to procure abortion with the assistance of her sister. She is now pretty well, and is getting better, and in the course of a few days she will be out again, but I think I ought to put you on to the woman.' To his mind, a thing like that would be monstrous cruelty. He did not know what the jury's view would be ; he spoke only of his own. Therefore, when it was said that there was a general rule existing in the medical profession, that whensoever they saw in the course of their medical attendance, that a crime had been com- mitted, or was about to be committed, they were in all cases to go off to the Public Prosecutor, he was bound to say that it was not a rule which met with his approbation, and he hoped it would not meet with the approbation of anybody else. There might be cases when it was the obvious duty of a medical man to speak out. In a case of murder, for instance. A man might come with a wound which it might be supposed had been inflicted on him in the course of a deadly scuffle. It would be a monstrous thing if the medical man might screen him, and try to hide the wound, which might be the means of connecting the man with a serious crime. That was a different thing altogether. . . . Communications between a doctor and his wife, or children, were said to be privileged where it was necessary to reveal them in order that the wife or children might be protected. He thought that that required a great deal of limitation, because cases might be imagined where the wife might be living under circumstances in which she did not want any such protection at all, and giving to her a secret be- longing to a patient would be only a wanton violation of the rule. However, it was a very delicate question, and would have to be argued some day. For further details of this interesting judgment, the reader is referred to the verbatim account in the British Medical Journal?- Compare with this opinion that expressed by Lord Justice-Clerk Inglis regarding the conduct of Dr Paterson, one of the medical wit- nesses in the Pritchard poisoning case. Dr Paterson, who was a wit- ness for the Crown, stated in the witness-box that he formed the opinion the first time he was called to see Mrs Pritchard in consultation with her husband, the prisoner, that she was under the depressing influence of antimony. His Lordship gave expression to his view of Dr Pater- son's attitude and action as follow^s :— He [Dr Paterson] said, in answer to the questions put to him, that his meaning was—what he intended to state in the box was—that he was under the decided impression when he saw her [Mrs Pritchard] on these occasions, that 1 B. M. J., vol. i., 1896, pp. 815, 882, D