'We All of Us Make Mistakes': Medical Negligence in Interwar General Practice

In August 1920, Dr Lysander Maybury began a course of weekly injections into the longitudinal sinus of newborn Leslie Shewry. Although Maybury told Leslie's parents that he would be giving their son injections, he did not tell them that he had diagnosed congenital syphilis. The precise nature of Leslie's treatment was also unknown to his parents until many years later when they brought a case for damages against Maybury. They alleged that he had wrongly diagnosed and unnecessarily and improperly treated their son, leaving him permanently disabled. Furthermore, they alleged that he lacked the necessary skills and training to perform such delicate injections and that he was negligent in persisting with treatment when he knew that Leslie suffered convulsions after each injection. Shewry v. Maybury is a microhistory in which the intimate disruptions wrought by one man reveal a great deal about the nature and consequences of medical negligence in interwar Britain.