Illustration of lack of care

Lack of ordinary care: In a French case of 1835, a doctor was held to have failed to show ordinary care. He wounded his patient when he bled her as part of a treatment. He then abandoned her and eventually she had to have her arm amputated because of the wound he had caused.

Lack of professional care was more difficult to show. In a French case of 1898, a doctor was called out suddenly in the middle of the night to attend on a woman giving birth. He discovered that the baby had died in the womb. He did not have forceps with him, so he improvised from the husband’s toolbox with a mattress needle, a large pair of scissor and a hammer. With these he proceeded with a craniotomy on the baby and eventually delivered the stillborn child, but the mother died from perforations to the uterus caused by this treatment. Experts found that the doctor ‘had not acted with desirable prudence and skill’. Given that he was operating in a house in the middle of the night, that he was undertaking a craniotomy for the first time, and that he lacked the necessary instruments, this was not found to be serious fault giving rise to criminal liability.