CAUSE OF DEATHS

Taranaki Daily News, 20 February 1935, Page 6

CAUSE OF DEATHS

heart failure frequent. CORONER QUESTIONS DOCTOR. Whether a doctor making an examination of a person who had died was able to diagnose the precise cause of death was the question put to Dr. D. Steven during an inquest at Stratford yesterday by the coroner, Mr. W. L. Kennedy, who also asked if a post-mortem examination would reveal the trouble leading to death as well as the obvious cause, such as heart failure. Mr. Kennedy had in mind statements contained in the report, published in yesterday’s Daily News, of interviews with medical men regarding the incidence of deaths ascribed to heart failure. One of the doctors interviewed said that often a doctor was called upon to sign a death certificate when he had no knowledge of the history of the patient. He could not know the secondary cause and was therefore forced to ascribe death only on his own finding, not always an indication of the true position. Frequently disease of the heart was the most obvious and satisfactory explanation. It was received without comment and the doctor was saved from spending time he could ill-afford on an exhaustive and perhaps impossible investigation into secondary causes. Was it not a fact, Mr. Kennedy asked, that while a doctor called to view a body could tell why death occurred he was often not able to say what led to the failure of the organ that caused death—he knew the primary but not the secondary cause? Deaths, he explained, were often attributed by doctors to heart failure but was the cause of the failure of the heart always shown by an ordinary examination? A post-mortem examination would show the direct and indirect causes of death, Dr. Steven said, but the indirect cause was not necessarily disclosed by an ordinary examination of . the body.