Sea Trial by Brian Harvey

Author:Brian Harvey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2019-05-06T16:00:00+00:00

Kill All the Lawyers

After Hatsumi went to sleep, I cleaned up a day’s clutter in the galley, retracing the steps of the dishwashing ballet that I would perform twice a day: wet the dishes with a little water from the foot pump, squirt soap onto a cloth, scrub and rinse with another few foot-strokes of precious water. Then drain, dry, and refile everything in rack and drawer. The battery problem Hatsumi had discovered didn’t seem to extend to our dedicated engine-starting battery, so I poached enough electricity from that one to light the sink. Outside, the moon was pallid behind a veil of cloud. The axe murderer’s generator droned on.

Already our boat was changed, the tangle of tools and wire and grease guns that filled Vera in the weeks before departure had miraculously transformed itself into books, dog toys, basil plants, and laundry dangling from the clever Japanese drying racks Hatsumi hung from the cabin ceiling. But I couldn’t relax; tomorrow would take us through an unavoidable section of Johnstone Strait and then to the town of Port McNeil, the second last settlement of any size before we took the irrevocable step of crossing the Nahwitti Bar. I needed something to take my mind off it all, so I dug out my father’s file on malpractice suits. An hour of legal nuts and bolts, that would put me to sleep.

The first thing I found was this quotation, from the Nicene Creed of the Anglican church: “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us.” The words introduced the chapter on “Malpractice and Negligence,” which my father had photocopied from a book called The Doctor and the Law: A Practical Guide for the Canadian Physician. The adversarial system, its author felt, should not be the only way of dealing with problems in medical practice because there will be times in a surgeon’s life — many times — when the right thing to do and the wrong thing to do are equally risky. Medicine was full of Catch-22s.

The author of The Doctor and the Law also wasn’t much in favour of contingency fees, which removed the objectivity of lawyers by giving them a financial interest in the outcome. Contingency fees incensed my father, as might be expected of someone who had just watched more than $400,000 go to the lawyers who had bargained a settlement against him. Doctors and lawyers are never likely to see eye to eye on this subject. Doctors say, “We have to treat everyone who comes through the door. We can’t cherry-pick and take only the ones we’re most likely to get a good result with. So why should a lawyer be allowed to?”

At the time of my father’s malpractice case, anguished commentary abounded: on the rapid increase in awards, on the cost of insurance literally driving doctors away from their practices, on the unseemly profits made by lawyers.

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