Tried on May 23 for involuntary injuries after a compress was found in the body of one of his patients, a surgeon working at the Vichy hospital center was finally acquitted.
The case arose from the complaint of a man now aged 83 and who, in 2015, had suffered post-operative complications after an operation on his stomach. Sufferings for which it took four years of examinations to find the origin: a compress had been forgotten in this patient’s body.
A compress found in the body of a patient in Vichy: a surgeon facing justice
But if he had recognized that a compress could indeed have been missing at the end of the operation, the surgeon had reaffirmed, in front of the judges, that everything had been done to try to find it. In vain.
The doctor’s lawyer noted that nothing proved “that the patient’s complications were directly linked” to this forgetting of the compress.
Arguments to which the Cusset criminal court was sensitive: the judges finally released the 44-year-old surgeon.
The prosecution had requested a six-month suspended prison sentence, noting in particular that the searches had undoubtedly been “insufficient” in trying to find the compress.
Pierre Geraudie
