FACTS:

Arturo Pelayo, a physician, plaintiff was called to render medical assistance to the defendant’s daughter-in-law, who was about to give birth. After the consultation of Dr. Escaño, it was deemed that the operation was going to be difficult for child birth, but regardless, Dr. Pelayo proceeded with the job of operating on the subject and also removed the after birth. The operation went on until morning, and on the same day, visited several times and billed the defendants the just amoun tof P500 for the services rendered to which defendants refused to pay. Counsel for the defendants denied all of the allegation and alleged as a special defense, that their daughter-in-law had died in consequence of the said childbirth, that when she was alive she lived with her husband independently and in a separate house without any relation whatever with them, and that, if on the day when she gave birth she was in the house of the defendants, her stay there was accidental and due to fortuitous circumstances. Therefore, he prayed that the defendants be absolved of the complaint with costs against the plaintiff.

ISSUE:

Can the defendants be held liable to pay for the obligation?

RULING:

No. According to article 1089 of the Civil Code, obligations are created by law, by contracts, by quasi-contracts, and by illicitacts and omissions or by those in which any kind of fault ornegligence occurs.Obligations arising from law are not presumed. Those expressly determined in the code or in special laws, etc.,are the only demandable ones. Obligations arising from contracts have legal force between the contracting parties and must be fulfilled in accordance with their stipulations. (Arts.1090 and 1091.) The rendering of medical assistance in case of illness was comprised among the mutual obligations to which the spouses were bound by way of mutual support. (Arts. 142 and 143.)

If every obligation consists in giving, doing or not doing something (art. 1088), and spouses were mutually bound to support each other, there can be no question but that, when either of them by reason of illness should be in need of medical assistance, the other was under the unavoidable obligation to furnish the necessary services of a physician inorder that health may be restored, and he or she may be freed from the sickness by which life is jeopardized.

The party bound to furnish such support was therefore liable for all expenses, including the fees of the medical expert for his professional services.
In the face of the above legal precepts, it was unquestionable that the person bound to pay the fees due to the plaintiff for the professional services that he rendered to the daughter-in-law of the defendants during her childbirth, was the husband of the patient and not her father and mother- in-law of the defendants herein.