During June 2021, Members received their copy of Volume 89 Part Two of the Medico-Legal Journal. As usual, the content has been available online and continues to be available together with all past issues.

Jane Turner, who has just been appointed Medical Editor of the Journal, joins with Editor Diana Brahams in an Editorial considering the legal and medical implications of the government’s decision to delay administration of the second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines.

The Journal reproduces two talks delivered to the Society: by Margaret Brearly on “The Consequences of Torture” and by Professor Robin Ferner on “Medicines and Murder.”

Original articles include:

• A discussion by Amanda Steadman, a solicitor at London employment law firm BDBF on whether, in the current pandemic conditions, it is discriminatory to require hospital staff to be clean-shaven.
• An article from contributors in Bengaluru, India, on the impact of online gaming platforms on mental health
• Consideration by contributors from Cambridge of the use of an out-patient procedure for treating emergency retinal detachment compared with the more conventional in-patient therapy and, given the different success rates, the implications for the patient’s informed consent
• An article with created co-operatively by authors from the United States and India on facial reconstruction techniques
• A review of suicide methods in Milan prison over a 26-year period
• A further contribution from Bengaluru on “Internet Regression” – the way the internet allows people to construct a “secret self”
• A discussion of the alarming rise in rape on Nepal
• An article from Australia on the development of commercial surrogacy in South and South-East Asia
• A contribution from Genoa on an unusual case of coma in a patient with post-traumatic epilepsy who suffered a spinal cord injury
• A description from Nepal of a woman suffering face-burns after applying a garlic paste to facial moles
• From Morocco, the sad case of a baby suffocated in the course of breast-feeding whilst its mother fell asleep
• From New Delhi (and Faridabad) the issue of whether negligence occurred in the case of a dead foetus being delivered after an alleged delay by hospital doctors
• Also from India, the danger of missing a diagnosis of “Cardiac Tamponade” – the accumulation of fluid in the pericardium – in this case where the patient had suffered a physical assault
• And a short article on future litigation in Italy following the Covid-19 pandemic

At the Society’s first meeting of the new season on 8th October 2020  Sir Robert Francis QC (well known for conducting the Mid-Staffs Enquiry and latterly chairman of Healthwatch England) handed over the presidency to Professor Harry Zeitlin, Emeritus Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at University College, London.    Professor Zeitlin addressed the meeting (held via Zoom and attended by more than 50 members) on the subject of “Expert Witnesses Past Present and Future.”  During the subsequent discussion, the meeting was delighted to hear from its former president Dr Neville Davis who, at the age of 95, is continuing to act as an expert witness.

Professor Zeitlin