Kirshner does not deny placing the tattoo - and has left washable marks on patients before to improve their spirits, his lawyer, Robert Agre of Haddonfield, said last night. He said none has complained.
"What's offensive about this complaint is that it suggests something he did was intended to be prurient, and nothing could be further from the truth," said Agre. "It was intended just to make the patient feel better."
Nevertheless, said Art Caplan, chairman of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine's Department of Medical Ethics, "you cannot do something like this even as a joke."
"If it's true," said Caplan, whose knowledge of the case was limited to a reporter's summary, "she's got a case."
Caplan recalled news reports of other cases where physicians left an inappropriate mark, such as a football logo, which had a legitimate purpose, such as indicating the placement of an organ for a future cut.
In a highly publicized case in 1999, a doctor in New York City went further by carving his initials into a patient's abdomen after delivering her baby by Caesarean section.
Mateo, the patient from Pennsauken, declined to comment last night.
Shivers, who practices in Cherry Hill, would describe his client only as a clerical worker in her mid-30s with a husband and young children.
Her suit does not criticize the operation's quality and names only the surgeon who performed it at Virtua Memorial Hospital Burlington County on April 28. The health system released a statement saying "the Mateo family has acknowledged that Virtua was in no way responsible for the incident."
