To the Editor:—We read with great interest the recent article by vanIneveld et al. on discrimination and abuse in internal medicine residency.1 Having studied the problem of violence against physicians in an American hospital,2 we were anxious to learn more about the Canadian experience with physical abuse of physicians.
The authors report that “approximately 40% of all housestaff had experienced a physical assault at some point during their internal medicine training.” We would be interested in knowing whether “assault” was defined in their questionnaire. While in a legal sense assault denotes “a . . . threat of force sufficient to arouse a well-founded apprehension of battery,”3 colloquially assault may connote battery (defined as “rude and inordinate contact with the person of another”3). We suspect that the authors were, in fact, actually writing about battery, since they refer specifically to “physical assault” (italics added).
If indeed vanIneveld et al. were studying battery, then their reported results differ substantially from ours. In our study, while 41% of responding physicians reported being assaulted in a legal sense, only 16% reported being battered. We wonder whether the difference in results stems from a true difference in the prevalence of violence against physicians or from linguistic confusion.—Frederick Paola, MD, JD, and Tariq K. Malik, MD, MPH, University of South Florida College of Medicine, Tampa, and Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, NY.
References
- 1.vanIneveld CHM, Cook DJ, Kane S-LC, King D. Discrimination and abuse in internal medicine residency. J Gen Intern Med. 1996;11:401–5. doi: 10.1007/BF02600186. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- 2.Paola FA, Malik TK, Qureshi A. Violence against physicians. J Gen Intern Med. 1994;9:503–6. doi: 10.1007/BF02599220. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- 3.Morris C, Morris CR. Morris on Torts. 2nd Ed. Mineola, NY: Foundation Press; 1980. pp. 21–9. [Google Scholar]