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Editor: Rod Sullivan
Profession: Maritime Attorney

Category: Unseaworthiness and The Jones Act

What is maintenance and cure? It is a ship's obligation to provide medical care and a living allowance for seamen who are injured on the job. It has been around for at least 850 years. The term comes Article VI of the Rolls [Rules] of Oleron, written in the 12th Century. Oleron is an island off the Atlantic coast of France, due west of Rochefort. The Rolls of Oleron were the first formal statement of "maritime" or "admiralty" laws in northwestern Europe, but they were based upon the existing laws of the Mediterranean. They were promulgated in England by Eleanor of Aquitaine in about 1160.

Article VI provides:
...if by the master's orders and commands any of the ship's company be in the service of the ship, and thereby happen to be wounded or otherwise hurt, in that case they shall be cured [cure] and provided for [maintained] at the costs and charges of the said ship.
Maintenance and cure was first recognized by U.S. courts in 1823 when a shipowner argued that the passage of a statute by Congress providing for a medicine chest to be kept aboard ship did away with the ancient right of maintenance and cure. The court in Harden v. Gordon, 11 F. Cas. 480, 484 (U.S. Court of Appeals 1823) disagreed saying:
In the construction of statutes it is a general rule, that merely affirmative words do not vary the antecedent laws or rights of parties. There must be something inconsistent with or repugnant to them, to draw after a statute an implied repeal, either in whole or pro tanto of former laws; otherwise the statute is supposed to be merely declarative or cumulative.
The U.S. law regarding maintenance and cure is that it is a duty created by the general maritime law which is not contractual in nature but which adhere to a seaman's employment contract. As the Supreme Court said in Vaughan v. Atkinson, 369 U.S. 527, 532-533 (1962)
Maintenance and cure differs from rights normally classified as contractual. As Mr. Justice Cardozo said in Cortes v. Baltimore Insular Line, supra, 371, the 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."