The jurisprudence of medicine in its relation to the law of contracts, torts, and evidence : with a supplement on the liabilities of vendors of drugs / By John Ordronaux.

  • Ordronaux, John, 1830-1908.
Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The jurisprudence of medicine in its relation to the law of contracts, torts, and evidence : with a supplement on the liabilities of vendors of drugs / By John Ordronaux. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    quent necessity imposed upon courts, in actions for torts committed by pharmaceutists, of searching in the fields of analogy for precedents by which to bring these innomi- nate wrongs within the limits of their penal jurisdiction. Under so elastic a system as that of the common law, it can not be necessary to invent a fiction for the purpose of establishing the principle, that, the duties arising from consensual obligations are not exclusively private in their nature, and limited ex vi termini to the contracting parties alone, but that postulate to this fact are the exoteric duties which every individual owes to society at large, in proportion as his acts directly influence the life, health, property or reputation of his fellow beings. Measured by this standard of necessary law, the idea of duty rises into something of more positive consequence than a simple moral obligation, and we are brought to the recognition of a class of duties which, although associated with con- tracts, ante-date them in fact, arising as they do, not from any privity between parties, but by operation of law, and remaining therefore of ever-binding obligation, whatever may be the nature of the contract itself. Whenever these principles shall be generally understood by legislators, they will hasten to provide means for securing their enforcement, and thus simplify the duties of courts in passing judgment upon the liabilities of vendors of drugs. In a work written to meet the wants of both professions of law and medicine, it has been next to impossible not to carry the discussion of many principles beyond that