HOW DOCTORS ARE DISCIPLINED

Evening Star, Issue 22576, 18 February 1937, Page 9

HOW DOCTORS ARE DISCIPLINED

Recently the General Medical Council took a grave view of the conviction of a doctor of wilfully making a false certificate concerning the cause of death of a patient whom he attended in his last illness, but it did not direct the registrar to erase bis name from the register (says a writer in the ‘Manchester Guardian’). It caused to be erased from the register the name of a doctor who in relation to the facts alleged was proved guilty of infamous conduct in a professional respect. The half-yearly sessions of the General Medical Council at Hallam street have all the appearance of a court of law, but differ from one in important respects. In the big council chamber, which, with its open fire, looks like an immense dining room, the place of the judge is taken by the president, registrar, and legal assessor. The jury are the 40 odd members of the council, all representatives of the universities, the British Medical Association, and the surgeons’ colleges. At the long table in front of the president are the solicitors and counsel, while the defendant sits or stands in a sort of box at the end of this. Witnesses are called. The defendant may employ counsel or solicitor. When the accusatory and defending speeches have been made it is not the immense jury but the handful of spectators who retire while the matter is deliberated in camera. Some of the cases are held in camera, after the defendant has been asked whether he agrees to this course. When a bell rings, “ strangers,” the lawyers, and their client return to hoar the result, which is solely that of erasure from the register or not, with now and again a lecture thrown in. Cases include drunkenness, drunkenness in charge of a car, adultery with one who is a patient, abortion, canvassing for patients, undue familiarity with and demonstration towards a patient, selfadvertisement. . The General Medical Council is neither a parliament for making professional' laws nor a union for protecting professional interests. The object of its existence is to enable persons requiring medical aid to distinguish qualified from unqualified practitioners. It is not generally recognised that the public are left free_ to seek aid from an unqualified practitioner if they like. The unqualified practitioner is equally free to practise for gain among those who choose to employ him. He may not, however, give a valid certificate of sickness or death, hold public apipointinents, prescribe dangerous drugs. Qualified practitioners, as a setoff to their legal status, are subjected to a central educational _ and disciplinary control. The instrument marking the distinction between qualified and unqualified persons is the Medical Register, of which the making and keeping is entrusted to tho council. .... The council does not initiate proceedings, does not employ detective methods, does nob act as prosecutor against practitioners. It takes action only in cases of criminal conviction or of official censure specifically brought to its notice or in cases of formal complaint made by responsible persons and supported by prima facie evidence. Also, if a practitioner’s name be erased from tho register it may bo eventually restored. It is really the procedure which resembles that of the law court—the op-

posing counsel, the rules of evidence. The sessions of the General Medical Council are a prime instance of selfdisciplino and judgment by one’s peers. There are many humorous interludes, as in the case of the Irishman, accused of drunkenness, who was warned, and who wrote to ask whether one more warning was due to him or not*