Medical negligence in nineteenth-century Germany

Abstract

In 1933, the German lawyer Friedrich Franz König published an essay on medical negligence. He pointed out that the number of negligence cases in Germany had risen to unprecedented heights in recent times. The years 1927–29 had seen an increase of close to 50% of negligence cases, as the insurance statistics demonstrated. König suggested that such a rise was due to the global economic crisis that had hit Germany hard. As a second argument for this growth, König referred to the doctor–patient relationship. He saw patients as increasingly estranged from their doctors and lacking confidence in the representatives of the medical profession. Finally, König claimed that the popularisation of medical sciences had made patients less reluctant to sue doctors. He wrote: ‘The traditional belief in the authority of doctors has vanished.’ Although such arguments seem plausible, it remains to be discussed whether (and to what extent) broader social trends had an impact on the figures of negligence cases. The democratisation of scientific knowledge, and the availability of data and information, as well as the rise in popularity of so-called alternative medicines and hence the contestation of general medical practice, all seem to have encouraged patients to sue doctors more readily for negligence. This chapter discusses medical jurisdiction in Germany as a case study to explain how professional accountability changed during the nineteenth century. It examines the transformation that occurred in medical jurisdiction, in order to discuss how doctors were held