Butler v. Brown
| Decision Date | 07 April 1982 |
| Docket Number | No. 63364,63364 |
| Citation | 162 Ga.App. 376,290 S.E.2d 293 |
| Parties | BUTLER et al. v. BROWN. |
| Court | Georgia Court of Appeals |
Robert John White, Atlanta, for appellants.
Sidney F. Wheeler, Michael T. Bennett, Ben S. Williams, Atlanta, for appellee.
This case involves a medical malpractice action brought against a medical doctor and hospital by the plaintiffs, husband and wife, originally seeking damages for personal injury and loss of consortium due to the negligence of the defendant in the performance of surgery, that is, a first rib resection and dorsal sympathectomy upon the husband in the defendant hospital's operating room. However, at the call of the case for trial plaintiffs amended their complaint, withdrawing the allegations pertaining to malpractice and inserting in lieu thereof that the operation was performed without a valid consent and the defendant doctor committed a battery upon the person of the plaintiff husband which caused him to be permanently injured and damaged as a direct and proximate result of the operation. At that time the complaint against the hospital and the hospital authority was dismissed.
At the conclusion of the evidence the defendant doctor moved for directed verdict, and the motion was granted. Thereafter, the plaintiffs filed a motion for new trial which was denied. Plaintiffs appeal. Held :
Before the operation commenced the plaintiff husband executed a "Special Consent to Operation or Other Procedure" authorizing the defendant doctor and/or such other assistants as he may select to perform a rib resection and sympathectomy. A part of this consent was a statement that the procedures listed had been explained to him by the doctor, and the patient understood the nature and the consequences of the procedures. The evidence disclosed that the patient (the plaintiff husband) suffered from a complaint of coldness in his left hand which affected his ability to work as a carpenter.
The plaintiff husband contends that the surgery to be performed was the removal of the first rib to relieve pressure on a blood vessel and restore circulation. He contends the defendant never told him that he was going to do a stellate ganglionectomy or the consequences of the proposed surgery, that is, that his eyelid was going to droop and he would lose some of his ability to sweat or that a consequence of a stellate ganglionectomy is that the patient will be left with a Horner's syndrome. As the result of the operation a Horner's syndrome was produced, that is, his eyelid droops, he lost his sense of smell, and does not sweat on one side of his face or his right arm and hand. The defendant doctor contends that he told the patient that there would be a very high chance that there would be a Horner's syndrome affecting his right eye with dryness but he felt that it was an acceptable complication but the relief from pain and coldness would be a much better result than to worry about the syndrome. The doctor testified that when you take out the entire stellate ganglion the chances are very high that you will have a Horner's syndrome. He testified that he decided to take out the whole stellate ganglion.
The plaintiffs enumerate error to the granting of the defendant's motion for directed verdict and to the failure of the defendant physician to disclose the inevitable consequences of surgery which vitiated the plaintiff's consent to the operation thereby raising a material fact question involving fraud which can only be decided by the jury.
The Georgia Medical Consent Law and in particular Code Ann. § 88-2906 (Ga.L.1971, pp. 438, 440) provides that a consent to medical and surgical treatment which discloses in general terms the "treatment or course of treatment," that is, when the patient in writing consents to an operation it "shall be conclusively presumed to be a valid consent in the absence of fraudulent misrepresentations of material facts in obtaining the same." The patient here admitted that he knew the operation would involve the rib resection, but that he did not remember that the consent contained the procedure involving the "sympathectomy." He further contends that the doctor never apprised him of the fact that the development of a Horner's syndrome is an inevitable consequence of a...
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