SURPRISE


DUTY OF CARE TODAY The importance of this ruling lay in its implications for our understanding of negligence. Three criteria in law must be met for there to be medical negligence. First, a doctor must owe a duty of care to the patient in question. Second, there must be a breach of that duty of care. And third, the breach must result in harm to the patient. Thus, the concept of “duty of care” is central to our understanding of negligence, and it may be defined as an obligation we hold to take care to prevent harm being suffered by others. In defining to whom we owe this duty of care as our “neighbour”, Lord Atkin created a new basis for the law of negligence, and of course his wide definition of neighbour would certainly include any doctor’s patient. Not long after the House of Lords had ruled that Mrs Donaghue would be entitled to recover damages if she could prove what she alleged regarding the snail, David Stevenson died. His executors agreed an out of court settlement of £200 (almost £10,000 today) and as such the case never went to trial. May Donoghue died in 1958, perhaps unaware of the global impact that summer evening trip to Paisley had had some 30 years earlier. Today, in Paisley you will find a small park, a bench and a memorial stone at the corner of Well Street and Lady Lane where the café once stood. Most locals know little of its significance, but occasionally you will see a stranger standing reading the inscription on the stone. Often they will be lawyers, sometimes doctors, who have made the pilgrimage from England or North America or from even further afield, just so they can stand on the spot where duty of care and the concept of negligence began.


POSTSCRIPT In everything that has been written about this case, including all of the original legal documents, the bottle in question is said to have contained “ginger beer”. What is perhaps not widely known is that the term “ginger” is a colloquialism in Glasgow for any fizzy drink. It is possible that in reality the bottle did not contain true “ginger beer” but some other form of flavoured, aerated water such as orangeade, referred to by Mrs Donoghue and her friend as “ginger”. Whether the bottle contained a snail at all is also a subject of controversy. Some have argued that Mrs Donoghue’s claim was just a hoax to extort compensation. Whatever the truth of the contents of that bottle, it remains the reason for our understanding of negligence around the world.


Dr Allan Gaw is a writer and educator in Glasgow MDDUS INSIGHT / 13


Photograph of bottle: Alamy


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