PRECEDENCE OF MOTIONS IN ORDER.-REPORTS OF COMMITTEES.

SEC. 8.

197

Resolved, That the privileges and obligations of membership revert to a regular physician on returning to the State. Passed, May, 1864.

When a committee is ready to report, the first question is whether the assembly will receive the report.

If the assembly, either by formal vote, or by tacit consent, permits a report to be read, the report, by such permission, is received, and goes to the clerk for his files-that is to say, in parliamentary language, lies on the table.

The committee, by the reading of the report, is dissolved and discharged, and cannot again act without new power from the assembly.

The report having been received, as above indicated, lies on the

table, and the matter may end at this point without further action being taken, or a word said.

But if the assembly wishes to discuss, or take action on, any part or the whole of a report, it can do so as soon as the report is read, or at any subsequent time, upon motion properly seconded.

Whenever a report, or any part of it, is thus taken up, it may be treated and disposed of precisely as any other proposition,—it may be allowed to stand as it came from the committee, or it may be amended in its statement, reasoning, opinion, or in its resolutions or other propositions, if it contain such-any portion being taken separately, several portions together, or the whole at once.

In whatever way the report be treated, the final question on any portion, or on the whole, as the case may be, is on acceptance, and "when accepted it is adopted" (Cushing, p. 151, §295) by the assembly, and becomes the statement, reasoning, opinion, resolu. tion, or other act, as the case may be, of the assembly, the same as it would have been had it originated in the assembly itself without the intervention of a committee.

(Though the question may be properly put on acceptance of a statement of facts, reasoning, or opinion; on agreeing to resolutions or other similar propositions; on adopting the order, or on passing or coming to the vote recommended, etc.; all these phrases are only equivalent to acceptance, which comprehends them all.)

The points then always to be remembered are, that a report is received by being allowed to be read; and that the whole, or any part of it, when accepted is adopted.

If the above exposition, strictly in accordance with Cushing and correct parliamentary usage, were constantly kept in mind by presiding officers, the deliberations of our Societies would be greatly facilitated and much confusion avoided.

CODE OF ETHICS

OF THE

AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION.

OF THE DUTIES OF PHYSICIANS TO THEIR PATIENTS, AND OF THE OBLIGATIONS OF PATIENTS TO THEIR PHYSICIANS.

ARTICLE I.-DUTIES OF PHYSICIANS TO THEIR PATIENTS.

SECTION 1. A physician should not only be ever ready to obey the calls of the sick, but his mind ought also to be imbued with the greatness of his mission, and the responsibility he habitually incurs in its discharge. These obligations are the more deep and enduring because there is no tribunal other than his own conscience to adjudge penalties for carelessness or neglect. Physicians should, therefore, minister to the sick with due impressions of the importance of their office; reflecting that the ease, the health, and the lives of those committed to their charge depend on their skill, attention, and fidelity. They should study, also, in their deportment, to unite tenderness with firmness, and condescension with authority, so as to inspire the minds of their patients with gratitude, respect, and confidence.

SEC. 2. Every case committed to the charge of a physician should be treated with attention, steadiness, and humanity. Reasonable indulgence should be granted to the mental imbecility and caprices of the sick. Secrecy and delicacy, when required by peculiar circumstances, should be strictly observed; and the familiar and confidential intercourse to which physicians are admitted in their professional visits should be used with discretion and with the most scrupulous regard to fidelity and honor. The obligation of secrecy extends beyond the period of professional services;-none of the privacies of personal and domestic life, no infirmity of disposition or flaw of character observed during professional attendance should ever be divulged by the physician, except when he is imperatively required to do so. The force and necessity of this obligation are indeed so great that professional men have, under some circumstances, been protected in their observance of secrecy by courts of justice.

SEC. 3. Frequent visits to the sick are in general requisite, since they enable the physician to arrive at a more perfect knowledge of the dis

ease-to meet promptly every change which may occur, and also tend to preserve the confidence of the patient. But unnecessary visits are to be avoided, as they give useless anxiety to the patient, tend to diminish the authority of the physician, and render him liable to be suspected of interested motives.

SEC. 4. A physician should not be forward to make gloomy prognostications, because they savor of empiricism by magnifying the importance of his services in the treatment or cure of the disease. But he should not fail, on proper occasions, to give to the friends of the patient timely notice of danger when it really occurs; and even to the patient himself, if absolutely necessary. This office, however, is so particularly alarming when executed by him that it ought to be declined whenever it can be assigned to any other person of sufficient judgment and delicacy. For the physician should be the minister of hope and comfort to the sick; that, by such cordials to the drooping spirit, he may smooth the bed of death, revive expiring life, and counteract the depressing influence of those maladies which often disturb the tranquility of the most resigned in their last moments. The life of a sick person may be shortened not only by the acts, but also by the words and manner of a physician. It is, therefore, a sacred duty to guard himself carefully in this respect, and to avoid all things which have a tendency to discourage the patient and to depress his spirits.

SEC. 5. A physician ought not to abandon a patient because the case is deemed incurable; for his attendance may be highly useful to the patient, and comforting to the relatives around him, even in the last period of a fatal malady, by alleviating pain and other symptoms, and by soothing mental anguish. To decline attendance, under such circumstances, would be sacrificing to fanciful delicacy and mistaken liberality, that moral duty which is independent of and far superior to all pecuniary consideration.

SEC. 6. Consultations should be promoted in difficult or protracted cases, as they give rise to confidence, energy, and more enlarged views in practice.

SEC. 7. The opportunity which a physician not unfrequently enjoys of promoting and strengthening the good resolutions of his patients, suffering under the consequences of vicious conduct, ought never to be neglected. His counsels, or even remonstrances, will give satisfaction, not offense, if they are proffered with politeness, and evince a genuine love of virtue, accompanied by a sincere interest in the welfare of the person to whom they are addressed.

ARTICLE II. OBLIGATIONS OF PATIENTS TO THEIR PHYSICIANS.

SECTION 1. The members of the medical profession, upon whom is enjoined the performance of so many important and arduous duties toward the community, and who are required to make so many sacrifices of

comfort, ease, and health, for the welfare of those who avail themselves of their services, certainly have a right to expect and require that their patients should entertain a just sense of the duties which they owe to their medical attendants.

SEC. 2. The first duty of a patient is to select as his medical adviser one who has received a regular professional education. In no trade or occupation do mankind rely on the skill of an untaught artist; and in medicine, confessedly the most difficult and intricate of the sciences, the world ought not to suppose that knowledge is intuitive.

SEC. 3. Patients should prefer a physician whose habits of life are regular, and who is not devoted to company, pleasure, or to any pursuit incompatible with his professional obligations. A patient should, also, confide the care of himself and family, as much as possible, to one physician; for a medical man who has become acquainted with the peculiarities of constitution, habits, and predispositions of those he attends is more likely to be successful in his treatment than one who does not possess that knowledge.

A patient who has thus selected his physician should always apply for advice in what may appear to him trivial cases, for the most fatal results often supervene on the slightest accidents. It is still of more importance that he should apply for assistance in the forming stage of violent diseases; it is to a neglect of this precept that medicine owes much of the uncertainty and imperfection with which it has been reproached.

SEC. 4. Patients should faithfully and unreservedly communicate to their physicians the supposed cause of their disease. This is the more important, as many diseases of a mental origin simulate those depending on external causes, and yet are only to be cured by ministering to the mind diseased. A patient should never be afraid of thus making his physician his friend and advisor; he should alway bear in mind that a medical man is under the strongest obligations of secrecy. Even the female sex should never allow feelings of shame or delicacy to prevent their disclosing the seat, symptoms, and causes of complaints peculiar to them. However commendable a modest reserve may be in the common occurrences of life, its strict observance in medicine is often attended with the most serious consequences, and a patient may sink under a painful and loathsome disease, which might have been readily prevented had timely intimation been given to the physician.

SEC. 5. A patient should never weary his physician with a tedious detail of events or matters not appertaining to his disease. Even as relates to his actual symptoms, he will convey much more real information by giving clear answers to interrogatories than by the most minute account of his own framing. Neither should he obtrude upon his physician the details of his business nor the history of his family concerns.

SEC. 6. The obedience of a patient to the prescription of his physician should be prompt and implicit. He should never permit his own crude opinions as to their fitness to influence his attention to them. A