Medical Malpractice and The Bloody Sign

On the 31st of January 1424, in London, a man named William Forest injured his right hand.

It’s unclear exactly how he injured it, but it was a deep wound to the muscles in his thumb, and it bled. It bled a lot. Piecing together details of the case in 1973, M.P. Cosman described the wound as having bled “frequently and profusely” (36). In fact, it kept bleeding, on and off, for nine days. Desperate to stop it, William Forest went to three major surgeons of the day: John Harwe, John Dalton, and Simon Rolf. By the ninth day, “William was thought to be in danger of death owing to the excessive loss” of blood (Gask 94). They tried a number of remedies, but nothing worked. William gave his “express consent” for a final surgery (94). John Harwe cauterised the wound , stopped the bleeding, “saved his life and freed him from the bonds of death” (99).

Later that year, William Forest brought a case of medical malpractice against the three surgeons for maiming his hand (175-75; Roll A 52). He sued with a claim of “iatrogenic sequelae”, arguing that their surgical intervention had harmed him with a new injury. A committee of “eight expert witnesses, including the master physicians and the master surgeons, under the chairmanship of Dr. Gilbert Kymer, churchman, rector of medicine, and chancellor of Oxford University” tried the case (Cosman 35). In their decision, they highlighted the fact that the injury had first occurred “when the Moon was dark and in a bloody sign, namely the very malevolent constellation Aquarius”, and that the bleeding did not stop until “the ninth day of February last past, the moon remaining in the Sign Gemini” (Gask 100). At the end of their ruling, they said this:

Wherefore we praise, we award and we decide that the aforesaid John Harwe, John Dalton and Simon Rolf individually by themselves and by any of them, especially John Harwe, acted well and surgically in what they did in the aforesaid treatment and that none of them made any mistake in any way in this matter. Wherefore we absolve them and each of them and especially John Harwe, from being impleaded by the same William Forest in the aforesaid matter by imposing perpetual silence on the same William in this affair. Moreover we find they themselves are so free from the fault attributed to them and to any of them and especially to John Harwe, defamed maliciously and undeservedly, that as far as in us lies we restore to them unsullied their good name so far as their merit demands in this affair. We further declare that any defect of the aforesaid hand, or mutilation or the ugly scar, so far as our industry avails to decide it, is due to the aforesaid constellation or to some peculiar defect or injury of the said William owing to the original wound. (Gask 101-102)

Talk about enchantment.

Early cases in English common law establish some limited forms of medical liability as far back as Thomas de Shene v John le Spicer (1354) and Stratton v Swanlond (1374); however, as far as I can tell, it wasn’t until Everad v Hopkins (1615) that ‘medical malpractice’ was established as a separate conceptual category. It was in that case that Justice Coke recognised a circumstance in which a servant who had received “unwholesome treatment” from a doctor (employed by the servant’s master) had action on a case to sue for damages despite not being party to the contract.

But the William Forest case was 1424. Right in the middle of the middle ages. If myth is to be trusted, this is 67 years after the Czech King Charles IV laid the first stone of the ‘Charles Bridge’ on the advice of his astrologer (Pitha 224). It’s 134 years before Queen Elizabeth I chose her coronation date in consultation with her personal astrologer, John Dee (Smith 164). Almost 200 years before the first English “pamphlet war” against the ‘efficacy’ of astrology (Camden 83), during which John Chamber published “A Treatise against Iudicial Astrologie”, labelling astrologers as “figure-flingers” and “starre-gazers” doomed to failure, with

the Astrologer tooting vpon the starres, but euen while hee tooteth vpward, and examineth in what signe is the moone, and the rest of the starres, the face and figure of heauen is changed before he can accommodate, and apply those things which he saw. (Chamber 24)

Incredible.