scholarly journals Medical Fees in Lunacy

1901 ◽  
Vol 47 (197) ◽  
pp. 435-435

The guardians of the poor at Yarmouth are of opinion that half a guinea is an adequate fee for each medical certificate granted for the detention of pauper lunatics in asylums. The local medical practitioners refuse to accept less than a guinea, when they enter on the serious responsibilities which the Lunacy Acts entail upon them. We should not have been surprised if they had decided to raise the amount to twice the modest sum which custom has sanctioned. The Legislature has taken elaborate care in this matter, considering the interests of the alleged lunatic, the interests of the community, but in no way determining the pecuniary interests of the ratepayers. No doctor proceeds to the examination of an insane person without a lively sense of the importance of coming to a right decision on the questions submitted to him. He must be prepared to answer for his findings before the law. He has to decide by a personal examination, which may cost him much time and trouble, if the person is of unsound mind, if he is a fit and proper person to be detained in an asylum, if he is in a fit state for removal to an asylum. These are not perfunctory questions to be answered haphazard. The wonder to us is that, after the experience of the medical profession in courts of law, the work is undertaken at all. Did we not record in October last how witchcraft was recognised by the laws of England, and how it bore upon the case of Dowling v. Dod?

Author(s):  
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.

While describing the peculiarities of cholera myths and riots from Asiatic Russia to Quebec, 1831–7, this chapter emphasizes the remarkable similarities across national and linguistic divides, oceans, and political regimes. The chapter argues first that this pan-regional mental landscape with the poor and marginal lashing out against elites and the medical profession cannot be explained by political events, regimes, or other causes particular to local settings. Secondly, these beliefs and struggles, instead of fading with successive waves of cholera, continued in places such as Russia, parts of Eastern Europe, Spain, and Italy. Moreover, their geographic scope and violence could increase, as with the total destruction of the industrial town of Hughesofka (today Donetsk) and riotous crowds reaching 10,000 in Astrakhan in 1892, murdering governors, counts, and physicians. As Fernand Braudel taught us long ago, pan-regional phenomena cannot be explained by local events.


2021 ◽  
pp. 103985622110250
Author(s):  
Jeffrey C L Looi ◽  
Stephen Allison ◽  
Stephen R Kisely ◽  
Tarun Bastiampillai

Objective: To discuss and reflect upon the role of medical practitioners, including psychiatrists, as health advocates on behalf of patients, carers and staff. Conclusions: Health advocacy is a key professional competency of medical practitioners, and is part of the RANZCP framework for training and continuing professional development. Since advocacy is often a team activity, there is much that is gained experientially from volunteering and working with other more experienced health advocates within structurally and financially independent (of health systems and governments) representative groups (RANZCP, AMA, unions). Doctors may begin with clinically proximate advocacy for improved healthcare in health systems, across the public and private sectors. Health advocacy requires skill and courage, but can ultimately influence systemic outcomes, sway policy decisions, and improve resource allocation.


Author(s):  
Yoann Della Croce ◽  
Ophelia Nicole-Berva

AbstractThis paper seeks to investigate and assess a particular form of relationship between the State and its citizens in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, namely that of obedience to the law and its related right of protest through civil disobedience. We do so by conducting an analysis and normative evaluation of two cases of disobedience to the law: (1) healthcare professionals refusing to attend work as a protest against unsafe working conditions, and (2) citizens who use public demonstration and deliberately ignore measures of social distancing as a way of protesting against lockdown. While different in many aspects, both are substantially similar with respect to one element: their respective protesters both rely on unlawful actions in order to bring change to a policy they consider unjust. We question the extent to which healthcare professionals may participate in civil disobedience with respect to the duty of care intrinsic to the medical profession, and the extent to which opponents of lockdown and confinement measures may reasonably engage in protests without endangering the lives and basic rights of non-dissenting citizens. Drawing on a contractualist normative framework, our analysis leads us to conclude that while both cases qualify as civil disobedience in the descriptive sense, only the case of healthcare professionals qualifies as morally justified civil disobedience.


1967 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 118-125
Author(s):  
Carl Diehl

Man's life is predetermined by Karma. The deeds of an earlier existence bear their fruits in the present life. That is why the poor man is poor and the rich is happy with his wealth and good fortune. One man is born a brahman and another spends his days as a pariah. The law of Karma has spread in the wake of Buddhism all over the Indian continent and far beyond, whereas its complement and presupposition Samsara for the most part appears as an intellectual conception with little foundation in popular belief. But Karma is not blind. On the contrary it is absolutely just, and for that very reason inescapable. This is, however, modified in so far as good deeds are both possible and profitable. The fatal consequences of the Karma of previous births end with this span of existence. Life hereafter will depend on the fruits of accumulated Karma here and now.


Author(s):  
Annabel S. Brett

This chapter looks at Francisco de Vitoria and his Dominican colleagues at the Spanish School of Salamanca in the middle of the sixteenth century. They are famous for their reconstitution and redeployment of Thomas Aquinas's theory of natural law to address the new problems of the sixteenth century, problems that beset Spain along with the rest of Europe: the power of the crown both within its own commonwealth and in relation to other commonwealths, and these powers both within Europe and overseas. For the School's most celebrated member, Francisco de Vitoria, natural law is the law of reason by which all human beings are naturally governed—the law of humanity as such—and, for him as for Aquinas, it ultimately determines the legitimacy of any subsequent human institutions and laws. The chapter also considers Domingo de Soto's The deliberation in the cause of the poor, which was published in 1545.


2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 317-343
Author(s):  
CECILIA ROSSEL ◽  
FELIPE MONESTIER

AbstractThis article analyzes how policy ideas already adopted in Europe, particularly in France, were taken into consideration for the design of Uruguay’s National Public Assistance (NPA) policy. Established in 1910, the NPA was a pioneering government social policy for the time and for the region.Some have argued that the design of the NPA law followed the secular and republican model instituted in France at the end of the nineteenth century when France established the Assistance Publique, particularly regarding the extent of public assistance to the poor, the role of the state in the provision of health care (as opposed to charity-based provision) and the centralization of health-care services (as opposed to a decentralized health-care system).We analyze how these revolutionary ideas were discussed by the technicians and politicians who participated in the process that culminated in the approval of the law in Uruguay discussed these revolutionary ideas. We explore the factors that motivated the creation of the commission that developed the law. We also review available documentation on the drafting of the bill and the parliamentary debate that culminated in its approval. We find that the design of the NPA included many ideas diffused mainly from France. The French model was not simply emulated, however. Rather, the authors of the NPA thoroughly analyzed and considered the features and main consequences of the Assistance Publique, suggesting that diffusion in this case was more a process of learning than of simple mimicry.


Author(s):  
Josephine McDonagh

Bleak House is a novel saturated with figures of unsettlement, in which characters uprooted by their social conditions operate within a plot animated by unsettlement, in an affective world dominated by feelings of pity and sympathy for those who have been displaced. Thresholds recur in the novel as privileged sites of heightened emotion. The novel’s preoccupation with unsettlement is best understood in the context of mid-century bourgeois aspirations to reimagine the nation as a place in which all citizens might enjoy freedom of movement. In framing this vision, Dickens draws on two contemporary discourses, one drawn from emigration, especially Caroline Chisholm’s popular ‘family emigration’ schemes; the other from public discussions about the law of settlement in the context of the New Poor Law. The latter were attempts to regulate where the poor could live, in the context of the bureaucratic reorganization of national geography that occurred at this time. Throughout, however, the novel displays profound ambivalence about Britain’s engagement with the wider world, expressed most clearly through its antagonism to overseas philanthropy, which it sees as a misdirection of national feeling. The novel’s vision of the nation, underpinned by its commitment to mobility and an ideology of freedom of movement within, but not beyond, the nation, produces its particular formal features and thematic emphases on mobility and movement, and its preoccupation with thresholds—doorsteps, entrances, and finally national borders—as places at which political decisions about inclusion and exclusion are made.


Author(s):  
Jessica W. Berg ◽  
Paul S. Appelbaum ◽  
Charles W. Lidz ◽  
Lisa S. Parker

This chapter deals with the legal theory and procedural framework under which patients can obtain redress for their injuries resulting from treatment administered in the absence of informed consent. The evolution of the legal doctrine was driven by the demands of patients for redress for injuries, and more attention has been given by courts and legislatures to the questions of when and how compensation might be obtained than to providing guidance for clinicians. In some important respects, the distinction between the law as it applies to the physician engaged in medical decision making with a patient and the law as it applies to that same patient who later seeks compensation in the courts is an artificial one. Insofar as the spirit of informed consent is not embraced voluntarily by the medical profession, but is adhered to in large part to avoid the likely consequences of failure to observe the legal rules, physician behavior will be shaped not only by the rules themselves but also by the way they are enforced. If, for example, the rules governing the means of redress were complex, time-consuming, and unlikely to yield the desired compensation, few injured patients would pursue a judicial remedy. As a result, physicians would eventually realize that adverse consequences were unlikely to follow from a failure to observe the relevant rules and, except to the extent that they had accepted the ethical theory of informed consent, their adherence to the doctrine would crumble. Some critics of the present system contend that this has already happened (see Chapter 7). On the other hand, rules that make recovery easier and more certain would be likely to encourage compliance with the requirements for informed consent. Differential emphasis by the courts on particular kinds of lapses by clinicians might also shape their actions accordingly. For example, the courts’ focus on risk information has led many physicians to tailor disclosure to emphasize risks. Thus, the issues addressed in this chapter, although framed in legal terminology, are important (some would argue crucial) determinants of the ultimate impact of informed consent.


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