The Law’s Delay

Hugh Cameron

Description

This is the light hearted tale of a fictitious orthopedic surgeon stumbling down the strange alley-ways of the intersection of medicine and the law, both of which many people find fascinating. As orthopedic surgeons look after trauma case, inevitably they become involved with ‘The Law’ as someone has to tell the judge and jury just what the injuries were and the expected long term outcome.
The incidents described are entirely fictitious, as are the characters. Any distant relation to reality is purely by chance. It is modelled after Rumpole of the Old Bailey, that stalwart upholder of the golden thread of justice.
The peregrination starts in Scotland, then moves to Canada with an outsider’s look at some interesting US situations. As the author has no legal training or knowledge whatsoever, none of this is to be taken seriously. The sources of the tales are wide and varied, occasionally from dim bars late at night and more frequently from thin air. As Kipling wrote,
‘This I have heard and this I have read
And this was noised abroad.
And this I have got from a Belgian book
On the word of a dead French lord.’

Sujets

• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris US
• Date de parution: 19 octobre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669852063
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

THE LAW’S DELAY
Hugh Cameron

Copyright © 2022 by Hugh Cameron.
Library of Congress Control Number:
2022913130
ISBN:
Hardcover
978-1-6698-5208-7

Softcover
978-1-6698-5207-0

eBook
978-1-6698-5206-3
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Rev. date: 10/18/2022
 
 
 
 
Xlibris
844-714-8691
www.Xlibris.com
847297
CONTENTS
Abstract
Acknowledgments
Prelude
 
Chapter 1Memories of Times Past
Chapter 2Education
Chapter 3The Law in Scotland
Chapter 4QUANGOS—The Curse of the West
Chapter 5The Interview
Chapter 6Subpoenas
Chapter 7Into the Quicksand
Chapter 8Judges
Chapter 9US Cases
Chapter 10Medicolegal Reports
Chapter 11Pain for Beginners
Chapter 12A Mixed Bag of Pain
Chapter 13Pain Again?
Chapter 14More Pain? Really?
Chapter 15What Is Truth?
Chapter 16Cross-Examination
Chapter 17Malpractice
Chapter 18Plaintiff Scams
Chapter 19Medical Scams
Chapter 20Whiplash, Taking a History
Chapter 21The Lazarus Effect
Chapter 22Traveling Trials
Chapter 23The Future
 
Published Books
ABSTRACT
This is the lighthearted tale of a fictitious orthopedic surgeon stumbling down the strange alleyways of the intersection of medicine and the law, both of which many people find fascinating. As orthopedic surgeons look after trauma cases, inevitably they become involved with the law, as someone has to tell the judge and jury just what the injuries were and the expected long-term outcome.
The incidents described are entirely fictitious, as are the characters. Any distant relation to reality is purely by chance. It is modelled after Rumpole of the Old Bailey , that stalwart upholder of the golden thread of justice.
The peregrination starts in Scotland, then moves to Canada with an outsider’s look at some interesting US situations. As the author has no legal training or knowledge whatsoever, none of this is to be taken seriously. The sources of the tales are wide and varied, occasionally from dim bars late at night and more frequently from thin air. As Kipling wrote,
This I have heard and this I have read
And this was noised abroad.
And this I have got from a Belgian book
On the word of a dead French lord.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In this book, there are extensive quotations from Rudyard Kipling, Sir Walter Scott, William Shakespeare, Kit Marlowe, Samuel Coleridge, Lord Tennyson, Edward Fitzgerald, Sir Henry Newbolt, Neil Munro, Oscar Wilde, Francis Thomson, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the King James Version of the Bible, and many others. Any memorable phrase is probably a quotation, and efforts have been made to put all such in quotation marks. Not all are entirely accurate, and a few have been modified.
PRELUDE
As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “It is very easy to overestimate our own achievements in comparison with what we owe to others.” The hero of this tale doubtless oversteps at times into the realm of fantasy. Truth often recedes into the mist of memories. Or as the poem says,
The garlands wither on your brow
Then boast no more your mighty deeds.
Many of these stories I am sure suffer from the golden glow of memory, softened by time and the gradual ebbing of passion. And some are rendered less than accurate, as recollection may have been a little befuddled by the consumption of copious amounts of the downfall of Omar Khayyam.
Come fill the cup and in the fire of spring
The winter garment of repentance fling.
The bird of time has but a little way to fly
And lo, the bird is on the wing.
We currently live in perilous times when truth is frowned upon and facts are regarded with scorn. During a recent US court case, the famed “fact-checkers” of social media admitted they did not know facts and were simply expressing opinions. Equally, the ignoring of the terminological inexactitudes, as Churchill would put it, of Climategate led to the tragedy of the patently ridiculous response to the Wuhan virus. After all, if you can ignore the dinosaurs and disappearance of the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods, exaggerating a not-too-serious virus is child’s play.
I still remember with sorrow many years ago when I first testified in a court in Canada and was unhappy at the outcome. A very good Toronto lawyer told me, “Grow up. The law had nothing to do with justice.” I realized then, in the depths of my troubled soul, that he spoke the truth.
In life one loses one virginity after another. I had been brought up in the naive belief that justice was the goal. In the same naive way, I had actually believed Immanuel Kant when he said, “The truth will out.” In retrospect, like most philosophers, Kant clearly did not know what he was talking about and should have got himself a real job.
Anyway, enough with the philosophy and on with the tale.
CHAPTER 1
Memories of Times Past
My father was the minister in a small mining village in the middle of the Scottish moors. It was a poor, hard place. The boys I went to junior school with all went down the mines at age sixteen, were married at eighteen, and had children at twenty. As everyone smoked in those days, probably most died of black lung or lung cancer before age sixty. In retrospect, it was free, easy, and wonderful. Apart from school, which nobody cared much about, the kids did what they wanted the whole livelong day.
Boyish arguments were settled with fists. Adults stayed away. An argument was finished when the loser would not get up again. As it was bare-knuckle, no one got hurt. As the manly art of fisticuffs is not practiced much in Canada, where schoolchildren are not allowed to throw snowballs at each other, I should explain. You cannot hit someone hard on the head with your bare fist. You will break your hand, as it is like hitting a bowling ball. You aim for the body or the face, as the facial bones are soft, like the crumple zone in car. That is why the paintings of the pugilists of old held their hands low, whereas the current fighters hide behind a wall of fists as Cus D’Amato describe the great Floyd Patterson’s stance.
In the infamous Gillette commercial, men are bad, bad to the bone, and children wrestling is evil, evil, I tell you. The world I grew up in was very different from those current arbiters of virtue at Gillette, and I have no regrets.
My first remembered encounter with the law was when the local laird and his wife were being entertained to dinner with my family. The laird, the local landowner, was a grim-faced, serious Edinburgh lawyer. He would be what we call in Scotland a grumach , or sour face, so we children were overawed and on our best behavior.
That evening, at the dining table, his wife, a delightful lady from South Africa, whose flaming red hair I still remember, and I were discussing shooting, which the laird had graciously given me rights to do so over his land. It was supposed to be vermin only, but he never defined vermin and never checked out what I actually shot, which was anything edible. If we couldn’t eat it, I was not interested on wasting a cartridge on it.
My father’s gravedigger, an elegant little man, taught me to shoot, among other things like snaring rabbits and pheasants, poaching fish using a long line, and other interesting pastimes. I liked him very much. When I left to go to university, he gave me his prized heavily chased double-barrel shotgun. My father’s shotgun was an old 1912 US long gun, which was almost as tall as I was when I started hunting.
The laird must have been listening to the conversation I was having with his wife with one ear, because when I mentioned something about shooting intruders, he responded.
“Young man,” he said, “you have to be careful with the law. If the intruder is running away, you shout, ‘Oi, Stop! Turn around!’ When he turns around, then you shoot him.”
I was a bloodthirsty child, brought up on the tales of mayhem, which was the history of Scotland, as it is for all mountain peoples, like Japanese, Kurds, and Afghans. The land was so worthless that the tribes fought each other constantly. The Scots never united completely against any invader, except maybe briefly under Robert Bruce. In that they were similar to the Japanese, who had four hundred years of civil war, only uniting once against Kublai Khan’s invasion. So I took what the laird said to heart and could not wait to try it. In Scotland in those days, many people had shotguns, so “break and entry” was not common. It wasn’t quite like some parts of the US, where the police encourage homeowners to shoot intruders. But I don’t remember housebreaking as a problem.
Scottish law is Roman law, quite different from English common law, or it used to be. I heard recently that they