SHOULD A DOCTOR TELL?

Press, Volume LVI, Issue 16883, 10 July 1920, Page 10

SHOULD A DOCTOR TELL?

Discharged from the Army in 1010 with "''valvular disease of ihe heart," and told by a military doctor that he had on!v three or four years to live, David Carey, 2S, of Battersea, drowned himself in the Thames. ,

Eustace Carey, father, was asked by the Coroner: Did your son" somctimcrefer to the fact that he was sentenced to death, so to speak?— Yes, he often said*so, and worried about it. Ho had been courting a girl for eight years, and the eouplo were on the best of terms. Dr. John Norton, police surgeon, oi Queen Anne's gate. S.W., who made an autopsy, said the heart was one of the healthiest ho had ever seen. There was no trace of valvular disease. The Coroner: What do. you think of a doctor who professes -dogmatically that a man cannot live beyond a certain number of 3 - ears and tells the man so?—-Vcrv silly and very unkind. And very wicked? —Yes. There are very few diseases in which you can diagnose that a man cannot live many years, and I have seen people with extensive heart disease live to bo very old.

In summing up, the Coroner said that for a doctor to tell any patient that he had only a limited time to live was generally very foolish and wicked. Medical science was not an exact science; and, as a. rule, the jnore dogmatic a doctor was in any prophecy he made the more ignorant he was. Carey might have lived for many years, "but some ignorant fool of a doctor, who did .not know his work, diagnosed heart disease and doomed him to death.

A verdict of suicide while of unsound mind was recorded.