Old school medical regulation: When doctors were crucified for their mistakes (literally)
Penalties for negligence have been around for almost as long as medicine has been practised, authors write.
Doctors have paid for alleged treatment mistakes with money, their hands and even through crucifixion, finds a review of medical liability through the ages.
But for one moment in history they had no medieval AHPRA to worry about, when patients rather than their doctors copped flack for poor outcomes, surgeon Dr George Bablekos, from the University of West Attica in Athens, Greece and colleagues report.
Their review, published in Cureus, found punishments at law for a treatment gone awry date back to texts from almost 2000 years before Christ.
For example, in the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, from 1900 BC, penalties for the doctor who inadvertently injured a patient during surgery called for the amputation of the hand.
