Publisher's Synopsis
The book presents a comparative historical analysis of the law of defendants? liability for negligently occasioned psychiatric damage, which the lawyers refer to as nervous shock. There has been a scarcity of scholarly investigations of the interface between medicine and law in this area of liability from a historical perspective. The book traces the evolution of liability for nervous shock, from its beginnings in Melbourne in 1886 in the case of Coultas v. The Victorian Railway Commissioners to the English decision of the House of Lords in Page v. Smith, from the perspective of the developments in medical science and psychiatry. There is an outline of the original medical literature describing psychosomatic reactions to life-threatening events which do not involve an actual physical contact with the victim?s body and the scientific endeavours throughout the last one hundred years to explain this phenomenon. The tort of negligence and the evolution of its constituent elements are analysed from the perspective of major developments in physiology, neuroanatomy, psychoanalysis and psychiatry. The nature of the legal concepts will be considered and their development traced through series of cases involving claims for damages for nervous shock. The book will also critically examine the concept of compensation in the law of Torts and the law of liability for 'mere' psychiatric injury as it exists in those countries whose legal systems are based on the Roman jurisprudence. -
