A Master Mariner’s Left Testicle and the Law of Surgical Consent in Mid-20th Century Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canadian medical and legal historians have given little attention to the history of medical malpractice law. This article examines one aspect of this subject, the litigation that arose over issues of consent in advanced surgeries, by offering a contextualized case study of Marshall v. Curry (1933). In Marshall, a master mariner from Nova Scotia sued for $10,000 in damages for negligence and assault after a surgeon removed his left testicle without his approval during a hernia operation. Marshall lost at trial, but the Nova Scotia Supreme Court decision became precedent for the principle that doctors could undertake more aggressive procedures without consent only if the patient’s life or health were in immediate danger. This study considers why these cases became more common by the early twentieth century, teases out the changing law of consent, and suggests what the case tells us about judicial attitudes towards patients and doctors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".