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Scene one

Good morning. Leech, Hawk, Hawk and Leech, solicitors, here, Can I help
you?

‘Oh, I do hope so. Is young Mr Hawk in the office? He is? Thank God!
I must speak to him – and hurry please, it’s urgent .. Oh, Mr Hawk, thank
God your’re there. My husband’s just fallen off a ladder and I think he’s
broken a leg. He can’t move and he’s in agony. Could you come at once please?
You will? Oh, thank God! And please be as fast as you can. I’m sure he ought
to go to hospital.’

Scene two

‘Hallo! Messrs Block, Block, Argue and Block? Good! Dr Prudent speaking.
I’ve just been called out to a man who may have a broken leg. The address
is 15 Jubilee Avenue. Please send a duty medical contingency solicitor round
and I’ll be waiting outside in my car in 20 minutes time to have a few words
before we go in.’

Some people (including, I would guess, a majority of doctors) see our
erstwhile Great Leader and her administration as the gravest threat to the
wellbeing of the medical profession and it’s customers. Don’t you believe
it. There’s another conspiracy whose members are sharpening their beaks
for a vulturine attack, and who could inflict infinitely more damage on
the healing art than any Whitehall meddler. They’re called lawyers. And
I foresee a time when the prudent citizen won’t dare seek medical aid, and
prudent doctors won’t dare provide it, without a lawyer by their side.

As ever, out American cousins were ahead of us slow-witted Englanders
in recognising that doctors are pretty ordinary people, quite capable of
making a mistake, and practising an imprecise art and science chocked full
of uncertainties and risks, so that many of their customers could claim
that they hadn’t received the goods as advertised. This insight has made
the country’s healers a favourite target in the great national sport of
litigation.

The game is made dead easy for players in the US by virtue of the local
rule which allows members of their noble legal trade to offer a ‘no win,
no fee’ service, so that complainant can command the aid of the sharpest
of sharp advocats at no risk to their bank balances so long as they promise
to share any loot with their ‘minder’.

The result has been a gross distortion of the manner in which American
doctors service their customers. Patients are subjected to unnecessary and
sometimes hazardous investigations and procedures in case the doctor concerned
should later be accused of having fallen down on the job. Alternatively,
patients may be denied desirable but risky aid. They are not handled in
the manner most likely (in the light of available knowledge) to benefit
their state, but in a manner least likely to allow some court and jury to
decide that their doctor has done wrong. (But even the most assiduous devotion
to such so-called ‘defensive medicine’ can’t protect the haples quack entirely
– witness the recent case of an American woman who sued her friendly neighbourhood
shrink because, she claimed, he had failed to prevent her from going entirely
round the twist and murdering her child.)

Moreover the now-routine suing of American doctors whenever a customer
feels dissatisfied has led to a ridiculous escalation in medical insurance
premiums, which cover doctors against claims. The premiums are geared to
the perceived risk of the work the doctor does. Obstetricians, for example
(a high-risk enterprise), are now charged so much that many medical graduates
who might, by temperament and understanding, make excellent practitioners
are put off from this important speciality, leaving the field open to hard-nosed
operators who don’t mind paying some tens of thousands of dollars a year
to their insurers because of the profits they can make out of performing
needless hysterectomies.

It’s beginning to happen here. Enormous damages awarded to the victims
of medical accidents by British courts have marvellously enhanced the interest
of our homespun lawyers in the medical scene, and the defence societies
have aped their American counterparts by introducing sharply differential
premiums.

But it is the newest twist to the involvement of medicine with the law
which disturbs me most. A recent issue of the British Dental Journal carried
a photograph of four grinning toothwrights in cap and gown pictured after
they had received a Masters Degree in Law (legal aspects of medical practice)
from the University of Wales.

That same issue carried a full-page advertisement (also appearing in
medical journals) from a firm of solicitors called Hempsons (who happen
to be the solicitors to the General Medical Council), which stated, inter
alia, that ‘We, at Hempsons, are renowned for our work in the fields of
medical and dental litigation. So much so that you might think of us as
the doctor’s doctor.’

Lucky lawyers, who see rich pickings to be had on both sides of the
medical fence. Poor doctors and dentists, who can’t feel happy in their
work unless they have a legal eagle on tap, or better still, a law degree
of their own to tuck alongside their MB or whatever. And poor us, who in
the end, of course, must foot the bill. The sooner we have a system of ‘no
fault’ compensation for the victims of medical accidents, the better for
us, the better for medicine, and the worse for the fat cats of the law.