The Standard of Care Owed by a Hospital to Its Patients

Despite the: great number of tort cases which have arisen between hospitals and their patients, comparatively little has been written upon the subject of the standard of care required of a hospital in its relationship with those who enter it for treatment. In this Note some of the types of problems arising out of this relationship will be examined.\u27 Questions of substantive and procedural law will be treated together in order to present these problems more clearly. Generally, public hospitals are excused from tort liability to their patients upon the ground of governmental immunity ; in most states charitable institutions enjoy some degree of limited liability upon one of several theories, all or most of which rest upon an underlying public policy. Since supposedly no public policy favors the exemption from liability of private hospitals conducted for profit, cases involving such institutions present most clearly the problems of the standard of care required in the hospital-patient relationship. Therefore only those cases and cases in which charitable institutions have been held fully responsible to their patients will be considered herein. Cases involving the liability of hospitals to employees, licensees, and persons other than patients are not within the scope of this Note. No express attention is given to the problems of the extent of damages, cause in fact, or legal cause, although in any discussion of duty these problems are involved to some extent

Domestic Relations -- 1957 Tennessee Survey

A large number of significant cases were reported during the survey period dealing with various phases of domestic relations. The 1957 General Assembly enacted several statutes in the field which should also be noted

Domestic Relations--1959 Tennessee Survey

In the case of In re Matthews, the supreme court once more was called upon to construe the adoption statutes and to determine the relationship between the juvenile court and a court in which adoption proceedings are pending. In this same case, the court had earlier held that jurisdiction of juvenile courts to declare children abandoned is not exclusive and that in adoption proceedings a chancery court may determine whether there has been an abandonment of the child proposed to be adopted. The supreme court had remanded the case to the chancery court. In that court, the Department of Public Welfare resisted the proposed adoption and asserted that in still earlier proceedings the subject child had been declared to be a dependent by the juvenile court, its custody had been given to the department and the cause retained in juvenile court for further orders. The department therefore contended that the chancery court could not proceed with the proposed adoption proceedings. The chancellor agreed and dismissed the petition for adoption. For the second time the supreme court reversed the cause and remanded it to the chancellor, holding that nothing in the juvenile court statutes prevents a circuit or chancery court from entertaining an adoption proceeding merely because the child is within the jurisdiction of the lower court as a dependent

The Standard of Care owed by a Hospital to its Patients

Despite the: great number of tort cases which have arisen between hospitals and their patients, comparatively little has been written upon the subject of the standard of care required of a hospital in its relationship with those who enter it for treatment. In this Note some of the types of problems arising out of this relationship will be examined.\u27 Questions of substantive and procedural law will be treated together in order to present these problems more clearly. Generally, public hospitals are excused from tort liability to their patients upon the ground of governmental immunity ; in most states charitable institutions enjoy some degree of limited liability upon one of several theories, all or most of which rest upon an underlying public policy. Since supposedly no public policy favors the exemption from liability of private hospitals conducted for profit, cases involving such institutions present most clearly the problems of the standard of care required in the hospital-patient relationship. Therefore only those cases and cases in which charitable institutions have been held fully responsible to their patients will be considered herein. Cases involving the liability of hospitals to employees, licensees, and persons other than patients are not within the scope of this Note. No express attention is given to the problems of the extent of damages, cause in fact, or legal cause, although in any discussion of duty these problems are involved to some extent

Domestic Relations -- 1961 Tennessee Survey

In the case of In re Van Huss\u27 Petition\u27 the Tennessee Supreme Court denied an adoption under a literal interpretation of the residence requirements inserted into the adoption statutes in 1959. Under the 1959 statutes, although the petitioners in adoption proceedings were not required to make Tennessee their legal residence, they were required to have lived, maintained a home and been physically present in Tennessee, or on federal territory within the boundaries of Tennessee for one (1) year next preceding the filing of the petition .... - In the Van Huss case the petitioning husband met all of the other requirements of the adoption statutes. He had lived in Tennessee all of his life, and he and his wife maintained a residence within the state. During the year preceding the filing of the petition, however, he had been in naval service and had been stationed outside the state, having visited the state only during short periods of leave. The majority of the supreme court held that he did not meet the statutory requirements for this reason and denied the adoption. The court pointed out that adoption is entirely statutory in nature and that there must be strict compliance with all statutory requirements. The dissenting member of the court felt that the holding accomplished a result wholly unintended by the legislature and that many residents of the state who were temporarily called out of the state on business would be disqualified by this interpretation of the statutes

Domestic Relations -- 1954 Tennessee Survey

An important case dealing with testamentary restraint upon adoptions was decided by the Tennessee Supreme Court during the survey period.\u27 The case was one of first impression in this jurisdiction and appears to be one of the few decisions upon the subject in the United States. In his will testator created a trust for his granddaughter, the child of his deceased son. He imposed a condition that if the child were adopted before her eighteenth birthday by someone outside testator\u27s immediate family, and if her name were changed, then the trust should terminate and the corpus be distributed to other persons. After testator\u27s death the condition was breached; the mother of the child remarried, the child was adopted by \u27her stepfather, and her name was changed, before her eighteenth birthday. The trustee brought suit in the nature of interpleader to determine the effect of this breach. The guardian of the child contended that the condition imposed on the trust was contrary to public policy as being an unlawful restraint upon adoption, and was merely an in terroren provision

Formation of Low Threshold Voltage Microlasers

Vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs) with threshold voltages of 1.7V have been fabricated. The resistance-area product in these new vertical cavity lasers is comparable to that of edge-emitting lasers, and threshold currents as low as 3 mA have been measured. Molecular beam epitaxy was used to grow n-type mirrors, a quantum well active region, and a heavily Be-doped p-contact. After contact definition and alloying, passive high-reflectivity mirrors were deposited by reactive sputter deposition of SiO2/Si3N4 to complete the laser cavity