Medicine And Law ' "Little Territory In Common?"

• Published date: 12 April 2023
• Subject Matter: Litigation, Mediation & Arbitration, Media, Telecoms, IT, Entertainment, Food, Drugs, Healthcare, Life Sciences, Criminal Law, Technology, Personal Injury, Social Media, White Collar Crime, Anti-Corruption & Fraud, Crime, New Technology
• Law Firm: Deka Chambers
• Author: Mr Simon Readhead KC

Simon Readhead KC, President of the Medico-Legal Society, gave his Presidential Address on 13th October 2022.

Professor Harry Zeitlin: Can I welcome you all.

By way of introduction, I am Harry Zeitlin; I am stepping down now as President. It has been a great privilege for the last two years and it comes to an end now as it should. During the whole of this time, we have shared a horrible experience due to Covid but the Society has risen to the challenge. Right at the start, Diana Brahams, our Editor here, agreed that we would start writing papers about Covid before others realised quite what was going on so we were able to react to it constructively.
It has been very difficult. We held our meetings on Zoom as people were not able to travel, but this allowed a considerable number of people to join our meetings from distances which had not been previously possible. We encouraged that and I should say that Malcolm Brahams was a great help in setting up our systems. It was not always easy. Am I right, Malcolm?

Mr Malcolm Brahams: Zoom meetings are easy, hybrid meetings are not.

Professor Harry Zeitlin: So, one effect of the nega- tive, horrible experience of Covid was that we could have people from different parts of the UK and coun- tries as far away as India joining us and joining in with the discussion.

Very sadly last year we lost our excellent secretary, Sandra Marcantonio, but we have been very, very for- tunate that Evelyn Palmer took this over and has been wonderful.
That brings me to saying thank you to all of the team who make it all happen; who give their time with- out expecting something back. I have sat on a great many committees and you would be amazed at how many people do it because they want something back, but our team are not like that.

I wish the Society the very best for the future. You are not going to get rid of me because I am going to be down there in the audience, but first I want to introduce our new President, Simon Readhead. Simon is one of His Majesty's Counsel, a Master of the Bench of the Middle Temple and the joint head of Deka Chambers in London. He is authorised to sit as a judge in the criminal, civil and family courts.

Simon has wide-ranging practice in medico-legal law, and my notes say that he has a special interest in catastrophic injury claims including birth trauma - I am writing a report on that at the moment - and other neurological injuries, particularly involving the head and spine. I don't want to anticipate anything he will say, but the interaction between law and medicine is fascinating.

It has been a time of great stress on health in this country, now we, as a Society, can help young doctors and lawyers move forward and feel confident and improve the system.
I have a note here which says that Simon was listed in the current edition of The Best Lawyers in the United Kingdom (congratulations!), and you were described in the 2023 Legal 500 as, "A truly outstand- ing silk; extremely knowledgeable and skillful." Simon has been a member of the Council of the Society since 2017, and he has served as one of the Society's trustees for the last three years.

We look forward to the next two years. Welcome to the presidency. (Applause)

The President: Thank you very much, Harry. Good evening, everyone. I would like to extend a particular welcome to all those joining tonight remotely, particu- larly our overseas members in America, Ethiopia, India and elsewhere. It is both an honour and privilege to have been elected to serve as the Society's next presi- dent. My first and important duty is to recognise the contribution to the Society of my predecessor as President, Professor Harry Zeitlin. During a long and distinguished career, Harry became an internationally recognised authority in child and adolescent psychia- try. After joining the Society, he became a member of the Society's Council and, for many years, he combined that role with that of medical editor of the Journal.

Harry took over as President of the Society in October 2020 immediately before some of the darkest days of the lockdown. He will, I think, always be remembered as the "Pandemic President". Throughout the whole of his time as president, Harry remained unfailingly cheerful and upbeat. As soon as it was possible to do so, he was quick to encourage the resumption of in-person meetings judging, rightly in my view, that it would be good for the Society and good for all of us too. We all have many reasons to be grateful for the immense contribution that Harry has made to the Society over a great number of years. Harry, thank you very much.

I should also mention two other past presidents of the Society, one of whom is here tonight, Roy Palmer and Bertie Leigh. Both stood down from serving on the Council in June of this year after, we think, some 90 years of combined service! That is a simply astonishing achievement. Again, it is entirely right that we should recognise the enormous contributions that Roy and Bertie have each made to the life and the work of the Society over so many years.

In a speech which he gave in March 1944,1 Sir Winston Churchill said that:

"The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward."

So, tonight, before I look forward, let me start by looking back. Malcolm Brahams sits alongside me. Those of you who attended, either in person or remote- ly, the Society's meeting almost exactly a year ago on 14 October 2021 will have heard Malcolm's elegant and affectionate tribute to the Society on the 120th anni- versary of its formation. If you missed it, do find and read it in the Journal.
Malcolm referred to several of the Society's eminent past presidents going all the way back to its very first president, Sir William Job Collins, in 1901. Sir William was a distinguished ophthalmic surgeon who also received honours in physiology and forensic medicine. Plarr's Lives of the Fellows of the Royal College of Surgeons of England described him as being "broad- shouldered with a fine head" and a "somewhat Olympian manner".
As Malcolm reminded us, Sir William began his inaugural address to the new Society on 3 November 1902 by observing that:

"It might, to the casual observer, seem that the science and art of medicine, whose goal is health, and the sci- ence and practice of law, whose end is justice and order, can have but little territory in common."

It seemed to me, nearly 120 years later and as the Society's 56th president, that I could usefully take my theme for this evening from Sir William.
There are, it seems to me, two immediate and obvi- ous contrasts between medicine and law. Most medical or, at least, most scientific problems have objectively verifiable, binary answers. Scientific "laws" such as the principle of buoyancy or the theory of general relativity are universal. They do not, indeed they cannot, change. Moreover, they not limited or defined by place or time. They are the same today as they were for Archimedes or Einstein.

Legal questions are different. There is no "litmus test" answer. This is why the Supreme Court compris- ing five justices, each possessed of a fierce intelligence combined with many years of practice as a lawyer or a judge, and invariably both, can divide 3-2 in relation to the same question. The law does not have the comfort of empirically demonstrable answers.
Legal laws are also of their time. In 1414 Parliament passed the Suppression of Heresy Act.4 This enabled the burning of heretics by providing that:

"the most notorious malefactors if they continued obstinate, or relapsed after pardon, .. . should first be hanged for treason against the king, and then burned for heresy against God .. ."

Today's guaranteed freedoms - of expression, of religion, of belief - would have seemed astonishing in 1414. Even now, the philosophical gulf between some of the legal laws in parts of the Middle East for example and those that apply in the rest of the world remains huge.
But there is some territory in common. The law...