The interfaces of medicine and law : the history of the liability for negligently caused psychiatric injury (nervous shock) / Danuta Mendelson.

Aldershot ; Brookfield, Vt. : Ashgate/Dartmouth, [1998], ©1998.

xxi, 319 pages ; 24 cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 291-308) and index.

The concept of nervous shock: the common law, witchcraft, and medicine -- Professor Erichsen and shock occasioned by railway collisions -- Coultas v. Victorian Railway Commissioners and the law of injury consequential upon fright -- Legal responses to the Coultas decision -- Traumatic neurosis, shell-chock, and nervous shock -- The 1930s: Donoghue v. Stevenson, the American law of emotion distress, and the case of an overturned coffin -- Employees, mothers and liability for nervous shock in Australia; Bystanders in the House of Lords -- 'Law, marching with medicine but at the rear and limping a little' in the post World War II period -- Jaensch v. Coffey and the new notion of proximity -- Post 1984 developments in medical science and Alcock & Ors v. Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police -- Aspects of the law governing recovery of damages for mere psychiatric injury -- Medical and legal developments in the late 1990s: not quite a full circle.