A delayed inheritance: The Medical Board of Victoria's 75-year wait to find doctors guilty of "infamous conduct in a professional respect"

The Medical Board of Victoria (Board) was created in 1844 to register “legally qualified medical practitioners”. It was not until 1933, however, that the Board attained the power to remove from its register a doctor who had engaged in “infamous conduct in a professional respect” (the power), even though the General Council of Medical Education and Registration of the United Kingdom on which the Board was modelled had been granted the power 75 years earlier. This article argues that the delay in the Board’s inheritance was attributable to successive Victorian Parliaments’ distrust of the Board and that this attitude was unwarranted, at least from early in the 20th century. The article maintains that the granting of the power to the Board was a crucial event in the history of the regulation of the Victorian medical profession. This is illustrated both by the difficulty encountered by the medical profession in dealing with doctors’ unethical conduct before 1933, and the Board’s concern to use its new authority responsibly and appropriately to protect the public and the profession in the three years after it attained the power.

Palmer Ward of Old University Hospital (Proposed Quarters for Institute of Radiological Research)

Photograph mounted on loose-leaf paper. Typed caption: Palmer Ward of Old University Hospital. (Proposed Quarters for Institute of Radiological Research)

Thomas Henry Simpson Memorial Institute of Medical Research

Albert Kahn, architect

Institute of Science and Technology

On the North Camous of the Univeristy of Michigan at Ann Arbor, consists of three structures; a central office building, a laboratory unit and a high bay laboratory facility connected by underground corridors.

A systematic arrangement of Lord Coke's first Institute of the laws of England, on the plan of Sir Matthew Hale's analysis; with the annotations of Mr. Hargrave, Lord Chief Justice Hale, and Lord Chancellor Nottingham; and a new series of notes and references to the present time.

Mode of access: Internet.

Annotated bibliography of the publications of the Institute of Child Welfare, 1925-1934.

On spine: Bibliographies of American statute law. Contents.-Bibliographies of the states and the United States.-Law library catalogues.-Selected miscellaneous catalogues.

Observing the law : applications of field methods to the study of the criminal justice system /

Includes index.

Catholic Child Welfare Society v Institute of Brothers 2012

Case law report - online

Renfrewshire Council v Educational Institute of Scotland 2012

Case law report - online

The National Institute of Justice guide for eyewitness identification evidence: Can it improve juror decision-making?

Mistaken eyewitness identifications of innocent lead to more false convictions in the United States than any other cause. In response to concerns about the reliability of eyewitness evidence, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) in 1999 published a Guide for the gathering and preservation of eyewitness evidence by law enforcement personnel. Previous research has shown that eyewitness identifications are more accurate when obtained using procedures recommended in the NIJ Guide. This experiment assessed whether informing jurors about the Guide can improve their ability to discriminate between eyewitness identifications likely to be accurate and those likely to be inaccurate and, if so, how to most effectively provide jurors with such information. ^ Seven hundred sixteen U.S. citizens who reported for criminal jury duty participated. Half of the participant jurors read a summary of an armed robbery trial in which the police followed the NIJ Guide when obtaining an eyewitness identification of the defendant. The other half read about an identical case in which the police did not follow the Guide. Jurors received information about the Guide from a court-appointed expert witness, one of the attorneys in the case, the trial judge, the judge in combination with one of the attorneys, or from no one (in the control groups). Jurors then rendered a verdict in the case and answered questions about the evidence in the case. ^ When an expert witness or the judge (either alone or in combination with one of the attorneys) informed jurors about the Guide, the jurors voted to convict defendants likely to be guilty and to acquit defendants likely to be innocent more often than did uninformed jurors assigned to a control group. These data suggest that informing jurors about the NIJ Guide using expert testimony or instructions from a judge will improve the quality and accuracy of jurors' verdict decisions in cases involving eyewitness identification evidence. However, more research is needed to determine whether the judge will remain an effective source of information about the Guide in a longer, more detailed trial scenario and to learn more about the underlying psychological processes governing the effects observed in this experiment. ^