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]. There is an implied obligation on a man holding himself out to the community as a physician and surgeon, and practising his profession, that he should possess the ordinary skill requisite for reasonable success, and that he should attend to the case with due care [122]. If the patient knows of the practitioner’s want of skill, he cannot complain of the lack of that which he knew did not exist. |58|