Lawsuit changed medicine

Jerry Canterbury boarded a Greyhound bus to Washington to join the FBI as a clerk, a job that was to be his ticket out of the coal mines of West Virginia. He had barely settled into his new life when he developed a sharp pain in his back.

In 1959, at 19, he agreed to undergo a spinal surgery known as a laminectomy, a procedure expected to resolve a ruptured disc and that he said his doctor described as “no more serious than an ordinary, everyday operation.”

The day after the surgery, Canterbury fell at the hospital. Another operation followed. By the time he was discharged more than three months later, he was partially paralyzed in the legs and permanently incontinent. He would spend the rest of his life on crutches, then in a wheelchair and finally confined to a bed.

Canterbury, who has died at 78, sued his surgeon, William Spence, accusing him of having failed to adequately warn him of the risks of his surgery. The physician ultimately prevailed, but a 1972 federal appeals court decision in the case became a foundation of the doctrine of informed consent and, by extension, the modern practice of medicine.

Robert Veatch, a professor emeritus at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University, said that he has taught Canterbury v. Spence to more than 15,000 students and considers it “one of the most important cases in medical ethics.”

Arthur Caplan, head of the bioethics division at New York University’s medical school, said the decision has “reverberated into health law and bioethics and our thinking of doctor-patient relationships even to the present day, even though he lost.”

Canterbury’s death — on March 15 at his home in Hartville, Ohio — was announced weeks ago in a notice in the Canton, Ohio, Repository, but it did not receive wide attention until it was reported by the New York Times on May 16. Canterbury’s sister, Nancy Farahmand, said her brother died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.