Doctor in the Dock

Stephen Sedley

• Medical Negligence edited by Michael Powers and Nigel Harris
  Butterworth, 1188 pp, £155.00, July 1994, ISBN 0 406 00452 8

I used occasionally to lecture to doctors at the Institute of Orthopaedics on giving expert evidence. With a hierarchical propriety that would have done the legal profession credit, the audience would arrange itself in order of seniority, consultants in the front row, registrars behind and so on. The occasion I enjoyed most was when I stayed to listen to the next lecture, ‘On Alleged Medical Negligence’, delivered by George Bonney, a laconic orthopaedic surgeon with long experience on the governing body of the Medical Defence Union. His tongue-in-cheek thesis was that the invention of penicillin had been a disaster for doctors, who until then had been unable to cure much other than malaria and syphilis (‘and nobody was going to get up in court and say: “That man failed to cure my clap.” ’) Where once the profession’s main therapeutic resource was the bedside manner, and the patient’s principal response gratitude, Bonney argued, people now expected to be cured and would sue if they were not.