Responsibility of Lawyers in Malpractice Suits

To the Editor:—  I recently read a newspaper account of a paper given at the AMA meeting in San Francisco concerning malpractice suits against physicians. According to the authors, part of the hostility of lawyers toward the medical profession may be due to the fact that law does not rank as high in the community as medicine and that therefore attorneys are envious and glad to make trouble for physicians. Such pronouncements by physicians do nothing to clear the air, but tend instead to cause more difficulties between lawyers and physicians.The statements about reluctance of doctors to treat attorneys who specialize in malpractice suits, and about judges favoring lawyers since they themselves are lawyers, are not true. Judges are fair and work in the best interest of all concerned.I agree with the authors that something should be done to lower the incidence of malpractice suits. Possibly some courses