maintenance and cure
Definitions from Case Law · United States Supreme Court
Definitions from Case Law
From 369 U.S. 527 - Vaughan v. Atkinson · 1962Most cited · 1,808 citing opinions
Maintenance and cure is designed to provide a seaman with food and lodging when he becomes sick or injured in the ship's service; and it extends during the period when he is incapacitated to do a seaman's work and continues until he reaches maximum medical recovery.
How the Supreme Court has restated “maintenance and cure”
Each Supreme Court definition of “maintenance and cure,” sized by how often later courts cited it. “Change” is measured by wording overlap with earlier definitions — a rough signal, not a semantic judgment.
How often courts cite the cases defining “maintenance and cure”
Court decisions citing the 12 opinions that defined “maintenance and cure” — 12,017 in all, by decade. Counts are citations to the defining cases as a whole, not verified uses of the term. The dip in the most recent years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the latest years.
All 14 definitions, chronological · 1928–1962
- ORIGINAL
the right to maintenance, cure and wages-which arises, quite independently of negligence, when the seaman falls sick or is injured in the service of the ship ... the right to maintenance, cure and wages, implied in law as a contractual obligation arising out of the nature of the employment, is independent of the right to indemnity or compensatory damages for an injury caused by negligence; and these two rights are consistent and cumulative.
The duty to make such provision is imposed by the law itself as one annexed to the employment. Contractual it is in the sense that it has its source in a relation which is contractual in origin, but, given the relation, no agreement is competent to abrogate the incident.
[A] seaman who fell sick or was injured in the course of his employment was entitled to 'maintenance and cure,' 'at least so long as the voyage was continued.
no basis for saying that, if the disease proves to be incurable, the duty extends beyond a fair time after the voyage in which to effect such improvement in the seaman's condition as reasonably may be expected to result from nursing, care, and medical treatment. This would satisfy such demands of policy as underlie the imposition of the obligation. Beyond this we think there is no duty, at least where the illness is not caused by the seaman's service.
The duty, which arises from the contract of employment, does not rest upon negligence or culpability on the part of the owner or master ... nor is it restricted to those cases where the seaman's employment is the cause of the injury or illness ... It is not an award of compensation for the disability suffered, ... although breach of the duty may render the owner liable for the consequential damages suffered by the seaman.
recovery of maintenance and cure, ordinarily measured by wages and the cost of reasonable medical care, if the seaman was injured or disabled in the course of his employment
The ship is committed to the maintenance and cure of the seaman for illness or injury during the period of the voyage, and in some cases for a period thereafter. This duty does not depend upon fault. It is no merely formal obligation and it admits of no merely perfunctory discharge. Its measure depends upon the circumstances of each case—the seriousness of the injury or illness and the availability of aid.
Created thus with the contract of employment, the liability, unlike that for indemnity or that later created by the Jones Act, in no sense is predicated on the fault or negligence of the shipowner. Whether by traditional standards he is or is not responsible for the injury or sickness, he is liable for the expense of curing it as an incident of the marine employer-employee relationship.
The shipowner shall be liable to defray the expense of medical care and maintenance until the sick or injured person has been cured, or until the sickness or incapacity has been declared of a permanent character.
The voyage creates not only the need for relaxation ashore, but the necessity that it be satisfied in distant and unfamiliar ports. If in those surroundings the seaman, without disqualifying misconduct, contracts disease or incurs injury, it is because of the voyage, the shipowner's business. This reasoning is as applicable to injuries received during the period of relaxation while on shore as it is to those received while reaching it.
A shipowner's legal duty to provide an ill or injured seaman with maintenance and cure; this duty may ordinarily be discharged by the issuing of a master's certificate carrying admittance to a public hospital, but a seaman who refuses such a certificate without just cause cannot further hold the shipowner to the duty. If a seaman enters a public hospital and proper and adequate care proves unavailable there, he may recover the cost of treatment elsewhere.
amounts as may be needful in the immediate future for the maintenance and cure of a kind and for a period which can be definitely ascertained
[T]he duty to provide maintenance and cure is imposed by the law itself as one annexed to the employment. * * * Contractual it is in the sense that it has its source in a relation which is contractual in origin, but given the relation, no agreement is competent to abrogate the incident.