VI. PRECAUTIONS TO BE OBSERVED UNDER SUSPICIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES;
WHICH MAY TERMINATE IN THE CORONER’S COURT, AND NEED MEDICAL EVIDENCE.
The primary duty of a medical man is to treat every patient as a patient.
1. Chronic or slow poisoning (including alcoholic).
Cautions. Try all possible preventive means before announcing the suspicion; do not move until your ground is quite sure: otherwise an action for defamation of character may result.
The family medical man must not be misled by the suspicions of weak-minded or alcoholic patients; he must exclude every possibility of an accidental origin of the symptoms. He should know the several personalities of his patient’s families.
The symptoms may appear during medical treatment: poison being substituted as “a lingering dram.”
If convinced, by repeated examination of the patient’s food and excreta, by his symptoms, and by the conduct of the suspected person, that the influence of poison is at work, let it be understood by the patient’s friends that you are not satisfied with the progress made: suggest the possibility of an accidental poisoning. Do not, at present, associate any name as the culprit; suggest a consultation with a medical friend.
Have the patient placed under the constant care of day and night nurses, who, although being instructed to administer personally all food and medicine, need not know at first your suspicions. If the line of defence is circumvented, or is impossible, have the victim removed to a nursing home, or to a hospital.
Your suspicions, without mentioning any name, should be told viva voce to the relatives of the poisoned person, to his solicitor, or to the suspect himself. If this course is futile, the name can be introduced in the information given to these persons, to the patient himself, or, finally, to a magistrate, or to the police. Should the victim die, the Coroner should be asked to order an expert toxicological examination of the body of the deceased.
2. Threatened suicide.
“There is a rule of life far higher than professional etiquette—a duty that every right-minded man owes his neighbour—to prevent the destruction of human life.”
“Sign an urgency certificate, so that the patient can be detained in his own house legally. Any step which is taken, which is in good faith, with the intention of certifying, is justified, and is covered by the law.”
Attempted suicide.
Special care must be taken to prevent a further attempt by constant unobserved watching. Delirious, melancholic, suicidal, and mentally defective patients are preferably placed on the ground floor.
3. Where a patient dies suddenly from a cause which is obviously not the one under treatment—as when anæsthetized, or after an operation.
Enumerate to the friends the possible explanations of the fatal issue. Affirm that there is no reason to have expected any one of them, and that all the usual precautions had been taken.
Report to the Coroner, or advise, where such report is considered unnecessary, that an anatomical post-mortem examination should be conducted for the satisfaction of all parties concerned.