Court Opinion

ID: 9447165
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 22:27:26.958865+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:30:55.403498
License: Public Domain

JOHN R. BROWN, Circuit Judge
(concurring specially).
T . ,, „ . . , I concur m the Court s opinion as to the appellant’s contentions ¿o. (1) and (2) and in the result concerning No. (3). This is not to disagree with the Court’s opinion as to (3). Indeed, drawing upon the same eminent authorities — to which I agree with the Court no real contribution can be made — I simply wish the grounds of my concurrence in the opinion to be made clear.
Availability of the facilities of the Marine Hospital does not determine the extent of time for which maintenance is due. The seaman cannot recover from the shipowner the cost of that which would have been furnished him free of cost. Hence, he may not recover surgical, medical and hospital fees and expenses if he unreasonably declines Marine Hospital treatment. But the Pub-lie Health Service has no special standing to determine the medico-legal question of the time at which the seaman’s condition has become static — the classic statement of the duration of the right, And if the outpatient treatment was required in the course of achieving maximum recovery beyond which medical science would not normally go, the seaman is entitled to the cost of his keep, *• “maintenance” during the period of that “cure.” He does not forfeit that right based upon such medical facts because he has left the Marine Hospital, for good or bad reason, or has declined treatment by it. Nor need he establish that the Marine Hospital treatment was inadequate or the staff incompetent. He must, of course, establish the medical fact that the treatment furnished by private physicians and facilities was reasonably required to achieve the static condition. He runs the risk, of course, that the trier of fact, whether Judge or jury, will accept the opinion and conclusions of the Public Health Service, sup*posedly disinterested, over the contrary views of the private physician. And he not saddle onto the shipowner ay fr °f the ?XpfS6S paid to Such privale facilities which would have been fur- • , , °f C°S\by ,the Manne Hos' medlcal opmlon of the b ubhc Health Service is neither the determinant, nor prima facie, the determinant. Nor does it become so by operation °f a “forfeiture” — a consequence which would, I add as a sort of personal footnote, be quite out of character with the tender solicitude lavished by the Admiralty on its favored, if not too much favored, wards.