Strictly speaking, the term _negligence_ is limited in its application to carelessness in the performance of professional duty; _carelessness_ is its proper synonyme. Duties performed without care, caution, attention, diligence, skill, prudence, or judgment, are negligently performed. Acts are so designated which are performed by one heedlessly, even when there is no purpose to omit the performance of duty. It is _non-feasance_, not malfeasance. It is the omitting to do, and not the ill-doing—it is the leaving undone what one ought to have done—not the doing what one ought not to have done—this last being a want of skill. In its various degrees it ranges between simple accident and actual fraud, the latter beginning where negligence ends [117].
Wharton, after criticising various definitions, proposes this, “Negligence, in its civil relations, is such an inadvertent imperfection, by a responsible human agent, in the discharge of a legal duty, as immediately produces, in an ordinary and natural sequence, a damage to another” [118]. |57| Negligence, in medical practice, is a violation of the obligation that medical men impliedly enter into when they accept the charge of a patient; such obligation enjoins care and caution in what they do, and in what they omit to do. A medical man is liable as well for want of skill, as for negligence, and an injured party may bring his action to recover for damage resulting from ignorance and carelessness, and recover on proving that he sustained damage from either [119].
Physicians and surgeons have specified duties imposed upon them when they undertake the charge of a patient. Refusing to perform their part of the implied contract will constitute negligence, and for all injury resulting therefrom they will be held accountable. It will constitute a tort for which the law gives damages [120]. Of course a medical man, unless he be an officer of the Government, charged with specific duties which he thereby violates, has a legal right to decline to take charge of a particular case. When in charge, however, he is liable for any negligence, whether of omission or commission, which may produce injury to his patient. _Voluntatis est suscipere mandatum, necessitas est consummare_ [121].