[[Selected legal aspects related to medical practice]

The question of the physician's liability, both that of civil as well as penal law nature--is always emotionally approached. Dynamic development of medical and biological sciences as well as technics is the cause of progress but it also gives rise to the increase of hazards or abuses in medical therapy. If we speak of the therapeutic intervention being originally legal we mean that it is carried out in compliance with the principles of medical art. In such circumstances, even though the intervention resulted in negative effects, the intervening physician cannot be made penally liable. Civil law liability, in its turn, may have either ex contractu or ex delictu basis. When the general prerequisites of this kind of liability are present, the intervening physician (Art. 353 or 415 of Civil Code) or the State Treasury (Art. 417 of Civil Code) may be made liable for causing damage, joint and several liability of the physician and the Treasury being also possible (Art. 420 of Civil Code). The carrying out of therapeutic intervention without the law required consent of the patient may lead--on the basis of Polish law--to the physician's civil law liability for the infringement of the patient's personal interests even though the intervention ended in success (Articles 23 and 24 of Civil Code). From the point of view of Polish penal law such situation may cause the physician's penal liability for the offence against freedom (Art. 192 of Penal Code). The euthanatic homicide should be, and in Polish law, is an offence. Considering the potential abuses arising from making the euthanasia legal, penal law whose major function is that of the guarantee nature, must ensure safeguards vis-à-vis life to the utmost limit. Polish Legislator shows, however, full understanding of the extremely difficult and conflict-generating situation in which the individual committing euthanatic homicide may find himself. Hence, in section 2 of Art. 150 of Penal Code the Legislator declared that "in exceptional, particularly justified cases, the Court may apply extraordinary mitigation of penalty or even depart at all from meeting out the penalty". Law regulations cannot however solve problems whose moral and ethical dimension exceeds sometimes that limited to law only. Hence in plenty of cases the physicians are left to themselves with the "verdicts" produced by their own conscience. And indeed, these verdicts may many a time be more severe than the decision of the Court because the physicians cannot appeal from them.