A delayed inheritance: The Medical Board of Victoria’s 75-year wait to find doctors guilty of “infamous conduct in a professional respect” Gabrielle Wolf * The Medical Board of Victoria (Board) was created in 1844 to register “legally qualified medical practitioners”. It was not until 1933, however, that the Board attained the power to remove from its register a doctor who had engaged in “infamous conduct in a professional respect” (the power), even though the General Council of Medical Education and Registration of the United Kingdom on which the Board was modelled had been granted the power 75 years earlier. This article argues that the delay in the Board’s inheritance was attributable to successive Victorian Parliaments’ distrust of the Board and that this attitude was unwarranted, at least from early in the 20th century. The article maintains that the granting of the power to the Board was a crucial event in the history of the regulation of the Victorian medical profession. This is illustrated both by the difficulty encountered by the medical profession in dealing with doctors’ unethical conduct before 1933, and the Board’s concern to use its new authority responsibly and appropriately to protect the public and the profession in the three years after it attained the power. INTRODUCTION On 21 February 1936, the Medical Board of Victoria (Board) decided that the name of Dr Abraham Bertram Cohen, a Brunswick-based doctor, should “be erased and removed from the Medical Register of Victoria at the hour of One o’clock in the afternoon on the Fifth day of March, 1936”. 1 The Board found that Cohen: (1) did falsely inform one Mary Ellen Mellody that fees amounting to One hundred pounds were required to be paid to Dr R Milne Wishart in respect of his professional services in the performing of a surgical operation on James Mellody on 9th November, 1934; and (2) between the 15th day of November, 1934, and the 30th day of April, 1935, having falsely represented to the said Mary Ellen Mellody that he had paid or would pay on her behalf or on behalf of James Mellody the said fees amounting to One hundred pounds, he did wrongfully collect from the said Mary Ellen Mellody or the said James Mellody the sum of Forty-nine pounds in excess of the sum actually paid by him to the said Dr R Milne Wishart. 2 At this time, a doctor could render an account to a patient for treatment provided by multiple practitioners without specifying the sums owing to the individual doctors, and then divide the patient’s payment amongst them. 3 In 1937, the Victorian legislature would make this practice a statutory offence because, as parliamentarians observed and Cohen’s case demonstrated, it was “open to abuse”. 4 A patient was “unaware of the fees payable to the respective doctors” and the doctors were * BA(Hons), LLB (Hons), PhD, Lecturer, School of Law, Faculty of Business & Law, Deakin University. The author wishes to thank Professor Danuta Mendelson for her generous review of and extremely helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. Correspondence to: g.wolf@deakin.edu.au. 1 Public Record Office of Victoria, VA1347 Medical Board of Victoria, VPRS 16389/P1, Board Minutes of 21 February 1936. 2 Public Record Office of Victoria, n 1, Board Minutes of 20-21 February 1936; see also “Struck Off Register Melbourne Doctor Over-charges Fees”, The Canberra Times (Canberra) (7 March 1936) p 1. 3 Victoria, Parliamentary Debates, Legislative Assembly (28 October 1937) p 200 (Mr Bailey, Chief Secretary). 4 Victoria, n 3. The Medical Act 1937 (Vic) (1937 Act) amended the Medical Act 1928 (Vic) (1928 Act) to create an offence for any legally qualified medical practitioner to demand payment from, render an account to or collect fees from any person for or in respect of professional services rendered by any other legally qualified medical practitioner, or to share or agree to share with any other legally qualified medical practitioner any fee or other remuneration for or in respect of professional services rendered (2015) 22 JLM 568 568