Medical evidence and the laws relating to compensation for injury / by R.J. Collie, M.D., J.P.

  • Collie, John, Sir, 1860-1935
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Medical evidence and the laws relating to compensation for injury / by R.J. Collie, M.D., J.P. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    is referred to the dorsal region, but it is true that the difficulty is increased when this particular region is chosen. The diagnosis is really not so difficult as it appears. Watch the claimant when he is dressing and undressing. Always ask a male plaintiff to undress, you invariably learn something from it. Engage him in conversation, interest him in, say, the details of how the accident happened. Enquire sympathetically whether he was treated by the defendant’s servants with proper respect and courtesy at the time of the accident. It is really no business of yours, and it does not matter one jot what was said, as far as you are concerned, but a claimant attaches immense importance to the exact words and expressions of witnesses at the time of tire accident. The details connected with the accident direct the patient’s thoughts from his anatomy, and generally from the role he is about to play. Nothing I know relaxes joints, and bends backs, which are otherwise rigid, as readily as a tender enquiry about the conduct of the defendant’s servants at the moment of the accident. , My experience is that if a claim happens to be made at common law, the back almost certainly suffers. If it is made under the Workmen’s Compensation Act, the patient specialises less frequently in the back, whereas in accidents occurring to employees of large municipal bodies, where the men have learned to expect impartial and just treatment, allegation of an injured back is almost unknown. The actions at common law which I see are mostly the result of tram-car accidents, and one is aware that in a certain proportion of these there are reasons for the occasional incidence of this symptom, i.e., pain in the back. The fact remains that the spinal region is the happy hunting ground of the recipient of a slight shock, who delibe¬ rately exaggerates, and of the dishonest malingerer who knows the difficulty most men have with injuries of this region. Pain in the region of the back is an invariable symptom of the so-called “ traumatic neurasthenic,” who has had his disease manufactured for him by the indiscreet and thoughtless suggestions of some weak-kneed medical practitioner. Most, but not all, cases of neurasthenia are conceived in the mercenary mind of the plaintiff, are born during an injudicious medical examination by questions so often asked which suggest symptoms, and develop rapidly to a full maturity under the influence of some rascally attorney’s clerk who has not a soul above fees—fees which are at the same time the measure of his own meanness and the price of his client’s self-respect. Quite recently I met in consultation a man whom I knew well enough to ask why he had recently given two or three certificates of sickness to a working man who was obviously well. His frank statement of the case from his point of view was as follows :—“ I do