A DOCTOR MUST TELL.

Press, Volume LIV, Issue 16214, 17 May 1918, Page 8

A DOCTOR MUST TELL.

JUDGE'S RULING ON A SECRET REPORT.

A new form of the old problem, "Should a doctor tell?" arose in Mr J Justice McCardie's Court, London, in March during f,lie hearing of Mrs Maude Yorlre's action to recover from the Yorkshire Insurance Company £1000 as'assignee of a policy on the ]ife of the late Mr Robert Smith, I*lll estate agent, who died from an overdose of veronal. . The company resisted the claim oil the ground that Mr Smith had not disclosed in his insurance proposal that he. suffered from insomnia and heart trouble and *"as addicted to the excessive use •ot veronal. The company's .doctor had passed him as a first-class life.

Dr. Dunlop, of Newcastle-on-Tyno, Mr Smith's medical attendant, 'was asked by Sir Ernest Pollock, K.C., for the insurance company, if he regarded jfc as important that an insurance company should be told that a person suffered from insomnia. ■'

Dr. Dunlop: I think, seeing thoy are making such a song about it, that they- should put it in their proposal form.

Mr Justice McCardie: I think the witness is quite right. The insurance form was drafted at a time when the usual form of intemperance was beer .or spirits. In the last generation a new form of. intemperance has sprung up—the taking of veronal or other drugs which in many ways are more deadly than whisky or beer. Dr. Dunlop objected to answer questions arising out of a confidential report he had made to the insurance company concerning Mr Smith. If such documents were to bo used in that way in Court, he said, doctors would decline to give information to insurance comnanies.

Mr Justice McCardie told Dr. Dunlop that he had better pause before Refusing to answer the questions. 'I shall not hesitate, even though the witness be a doctor, to make the witness feel the power of the law," he added.

Dr. Dunlop thereupon answered the questions, and at the conclusion of the cross-examination Mr Justice McCardie told him ho had done nothing disloyal to his profession in answering the questions. "Even loyalty," he said, "must sometimes yield to the requirements of justice."