Court Opinion

ID: 9461521
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 22:16:16.156249+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:37:06.033244
License: Public Domain

GEE, Circuit Judge
(dissenting):
The foundations of the law maritime will not likely be shaken by the amiable *740result which the majority reaches. Under it the district court is to reconsider whether a fat seaman, unwilling to stay on his diet but able to con the treating physician provided by the shipowner into releasing him from supervision, should or should not be rewarded for his eloquence, and if so, by how much. No one seriously disputes that had Coulter kept on his diet he would have attained maximum recovery. No one argues that he did not abandon it about the time maintenance was stopped, like one who drops a glass bottle of nasty but curative medicine. Yet somehow it has been determined that his abandonment of it may not have been an unreasonable refusal of treatment. This conclusion seems to rest on the shipowner’s failure to pursue Coulter with sufficient ardor, nagging and beseeching him (presumably, since it could not force him) to stick to tea and celery and leave the beer and beans alone.
Language in Oswalt v. Williamson Towing Co., Inc., 488 F.2d 51 (5th Cir. 1974) is exactly in point here:
A forfeiture for unreasonable refusal is called into play in one of two ways. First, the seaman may simply reject all timely medical attention or quit participation in a course of therapy already begun. In such a case, the right to maintenance and cure is forfeited because the purpose of the award can no longer be achieved. These conjunctive remedies do not operate as substitutes for damages; they are not general compensation, but rather are directed toward the specific objective of providing for the subsistence and medical expenses of a seaman until he has reached the point of maximum possible cure. Farrell v. United States, 1949, 336 U.S. 511, 69 S.Ct. 707, 93 L.Ed. 850; Price v. Mosler, 5 Cir. 1973, 483 F.2d 275. When, therefore, that point is either reached or the erstwhile patient voluntarily stops short of its attainment by refusing medical attention, the justification for the payments likewise ceases. Brown v. Aggie & Millie, Inc., [5 Cir. 1973, 485 F.2d 1293] supra.
Oswalt at 53-54.
The fact that Coulter would have received maintenance for at least six months had he not discontinued his treatment seems to me immaterial. Maintenance is an award designed to provide succor for the seaman, not until he becomes well, but while he is undergoing treatment designed to bring him to maximum cure. Indeed, it may be seen as an inducement to do so. Maximum cure is one terminal point of the shipowner’s obligation to pay maintenance. Abandonment of treatment is another.
It well may be that Coulter would be entitled to maintenance at our hands if he could show that his condition had originally been pronounced hopeless and that a new type of treatment had later been discovered. But here there is nothing which leads anywhere but to the conclusion that had Coulter followed the doctor’s orders he would have lost weight and that had he lost weight his ribs would have knit. It seems unreasonable to expect a shipowner to maintain a seaman on an on-again-off-again basis whenever the seaman decides to give a known treatment another chance.
Further, as noted above, however benevolent to Coulter the majority’s result may be, casting the shipowner for failing to make a seaman do a thing it had no power to require seems to me unjust— let alone rewarding the seaman for his own delinquence. Even afloat, responsibility for a result should not be pressed much beyond power to effect it. Charitably doing so here, we inch toward new heights of anachronism the image of that noble but feckless Ward of the Admiralty, the sea-chest-bearing sailor with heart of oak, good company on a voyage to Treasure Island but scarce among the ranks of today’s seagoing technicians.
I would affirm.