MEDICAL RESPONSIBILITY.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LII, Issue 57, 1 April 1909, Page 4

MEDICAL RESPONSIBILITY.

THE GOODE CASE. The Wellington Evening Post recently commented upon ail obvious aspect of the (looile case, one which struck most thoughtful people. That was that a man who was. according to the evidence, for a considerable time irresponsible for Ids actions through excessive alconolism and otherwise, was allowed to continue exercising the awful responsibility of a medical man until red murder brought the police upon him. The, lay evidence showed that his condition had been notorious, the expert evidence that it was not a thing of yesterday, and that dangerous conditions existed apart from alcoholism. A correspondent of our Wellington contemporary blamed thu Medical Association for not taking action in such a case, and the same thought Jias continually occurred to laymen that while ..the B.M.A. is very fond of splitting straws as to medical"''etiquette," and going to ■what ordinary folks regard as sometimes ridiculous extremes to insure that all the newspaper prominence shall be for the quack, and the legitimate practitioners shall be shut out from it, it docs nothing apparently to protect the public from abuses on the part of the legally qualified men. The Law Societies do move from time to time—too tardily most people think—to rid their profession of black sheep, but the B.M.A. not at all. Defending the Association from this criticism a medical correspondent now writes :

"Provided that a medical man does not commit crime and he convicted of it before a Court, he can be insane, can be consistently drunk, can assault criminally or otherwise his patients, and commit almost any misdeamour without let or hindrance, and yet can practice his profession if patients are silly or ignorant enough to trust him. The law does not protect them nor the

profession from this state of affairs." Surely a more sweeping indictment could not be written than that defence. It is not sufficient to put the responsibility on the public. It is one of the curiosities of public opinion that drunkenness, on the part of a professional man, is as often as not taken as an evidence of genius, and if the B.M.A. with its special knowledge of the danger that lies in such men does not make some effort to warn or protect the public from them, it would seem to be failing in a duty which should be a corollary of the special privileges rightly accorded to it by law and custom.