A physician should take all possible care to prevent the spread of smallpox or any other contagious disease, and use all such precautionary measures as may appear desirable. So, where the paper upon the walls of a room in which there had been smallpox patients had become so soiled and smeared with the smallpox virus as to make its removal necessary, a physician or other attendant may order the paper to be torn down; and the landlord cannot successfully maintain an action against the physician for doing this [388]. Apparently a surgeon may retain the limbs he cuts off a patient, upon the ground that parts of the body when severed become dead, and at common law there is no property in a dead human body. The point was once contested in Washington [389]. |144| A surgeon who attends a duel, although to save by his skill if possible the lives therein imperilled, will be held guilty of aiding and abetting the principal offender in the event of death ensuing [390]. If a medical practitioner wilfully injures a patient he is liable to be indicted for an assault, and if death ensue from the injuries so inflicted he may be indicted for murder. And this is so even though the patient might have submitted at the time from the supposition that the treatment was for his good. Having or attempting to have carnal connection with a female patient under pretence of treating her medically is an assault [391]. Making a female patient strip naked, under pretence that the defendant, a medical practitioner, cannot otherwise judge of her illness, if he himself takes off her clothes, contrary to her wishes, is an assault. In this case the jury found that the defendant had stripped the girl wantonly, and not from any belief that it was necessary [392].