Getting the spinal backstory with Simon Wheatley
Simon Wheatley explains why spinal injuries are so difficult to categorise from a medico-legal point of view
The body is a combination of its parts, including the brain, skeleton and internal organs. When it comes to the quantification of damage, legal professionals tend to concentrate on a specific element of the body. The small handbook Judicial College Guidelines for the Assessment of General Damages, encourages that focus, by segregating the body into distinct portions, and then providing a bracket of financial compensation for each area of the body.
This is a simplistic approach to quantification, since not only do most injuries involve multiple zones, but there are likely to be overlaps between mental anguish and physical loss.
The spine, though, represents a particularly sensitive area of the body, rendering the bracket system virtually meaningless. Whereas the loss of sight in one eye is valued by the guidelines in a relatively narrow band of between £39,820 to £44,330, and the amputation of an arm (above the elbow) ranges from £88,660 to £105,875, damages to the spine vary in damages from £1,500 to over £326,000.
What then, is so different about spinal injuries?
Cultural symbolism
First, the spine has traditionally represented something more than a mere body part. Consider these words from Herman Melville’s classic novel, Moby Dick: “I believe that much of a man’s character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul. I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to the world.”
That view may now be regarded overly heroic and outmoded, were it not for the fact the absence of a spine is still categorised as ‘spineless’. And the term is, of course, generally defined as weak and purposeless. Consequently, many people still believe their emotional response to an event is felt in the spine. Not only do they feel their hackles rising (erectile hairs along an animal’s back, which rise when it is angry or alarmed); but they obtain sensations of pleasure or fear by watching a spine chiller.
What’s more, until the abolition of the death penalty in 1964, the state authorised judicial execution to be carried out by hanging. The mechanism was a forcible hyperextension of the head, usually with distraction of the neck leading to a fracture at the level of the second vertebra of the cervical spine – the hangman’s fracture). This is the same mechanism which operates to cause damage, though not usually lethal, in the majority of whiplash injuries.
Thus, traditionally we regarded our spines as an embodiment of rectitude (uprightness) and sensitivity.
Degeneratio