Medico-legal radiology. William S C Hare. Sydney: Churchill Livingstone, 2007 (ix + 201 pp). ISBN 978 0 7295 3831 2.

Emeritus Professor W S C (Bill) Hare had a long and distinguished career in clinical radiology, including a term as President of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Radiologists and Chair of Radiology at the University of Melbourne and the Royal Melbourne Hospital. In retirement, he has continued an active medicolegal practice as well as his writing. This latest book draws on both his personal experience and an extensive review of the extant literature.

The first chapter, “Lawmakers and legal processes”, is as succinct a summary of the structure and practice of the law as I have seen. The second chapter, “Radiologists and the law”, examines how both statute and civil law can impinge on doctors in general and radiologists in particular, and the roles doctors can take in legal proceedings (ie, as defendant or as expert witness). The third chapter deals briefly with no-fault and fault-based systems of compensation for iatrogenic injuries, and looks at why patients sue, who they sue, the results of litigation and the impact of the cost of litigation on medical indemnity insurance premiums.

Chapter four is a brief primer on how to interpret diagnostic images — a seven-page summary that would make valuable reading for any student or recent graduate, or indeed any doctor who needs to make sense of such images.

The fifth chapter, on writing reports, is pure gold. When a defence organisation runs an expert witness seminar, attendees are desperate to learn how to manage themselves in court. But most will write dozens of reports for every time they actually go to court, and the quality of their report will have a great influence on whether they need to be called at all. Doctors generally write poor reports, because few seek instruction on how to write good ones. For radiologists, Professor Hare has now, in just nine pages, written the definitive primer.

The remaining 10 chapters deal systematically with the major areas of medicolegal concern in radiology and conclude with a chapter on necroradiology (the title Hare adopts for radiological examination of the dead). Each chapter deals separately with litigation arising from diagnosis and litigation related to procedures. Each chapter ends with a series of dot-pointed “suggestions” which radiology registrars would be well advised to commit to memory!

This is a relatively short, well written book. While written in an Australian context, the “suggestions” have application to any radiologist anywhere in the world.