|24 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



come into fierce collision ; there is the conflict of medical testimony, 

 and the common-sense of judge and jury is frequently insulted. It 

 would be a golden rule for a medical man never to use a scientific term 

 if a popular term would serve his use as well. The medical man not 

 only states facts, but obtrudes his explanations and theories about 

 them, and does so in highly technical language. The legal mind re- 

 volts against the assumption of the medical mind, and in this way 

 much prejudice is done to science. The lawyers are pretty unanimous 

 m holding that a medical man is the worst possible witness. He can- 

 not plead privilege, like the lawyer or the confessor, and his best plan 

 is to tell his story at once, in the most intelligible and straightforward 

 way that he can. The eminent German physician, Caspar, who for 

 many years was forensic physician to the Berlin justiciary courts, is 

 very severe upon medical witnesses : " How often have I heard physi- 

 cians talking to the judge and jury of ' excited sensibility,' ' reflex 

 movements,' ' coma,' ' idiopathic,' etc., without for one minute consid- 

 ering that they were using words and expressions wholly unintelligible 

 to unprofessional parties ! " Caspar's work is a perfect thesaurus of 

 odd incidents and cases ; and, if read, it ought to be compared with 

 Taylor's "Medical Jurisprudence," that we may compare the difference 

 between the English and the Prussian systems. The Prussian plan of 

 having an accredited medical officer attached to a court, who in some 

 sort of way is a minister of justice, is certainly an improvement on a 

 scene not infrequently witnessed in English courts, where a criminal 

 trial is turned into an arena for the conflict of scientific testimony. 



If you take the volumes of Caspar, and Prof. Taylor's book, and 

 throw in a little more sparkling literature, like " Christison on Poisons " 

 Christison, like the Fat Boy, will make your flesh creep you will 

 have the materials a veritable huge quarry out of which you may 

 hammer all kinds of sensational and romantic stories. You may read 

 up the murderers, just as old Boffin read up the misers. There is the 

 eccentric Miss Blandy, of Oxfordshire, who poisoned her father as a 

 means for promoting her matrimonial projects ; the highly luxurious 

 and wealthy people who have tried to poison, not with vulgar lead and 

 arsenic, but with silver and gold ; the aberrant wife who poured poison 

 down her husband's open mouth as he was sleeping. Then there are 

 cases where a three-volume plot might easily be elaborated where a 

 man or woman had actually taken poison, and secreted poison about 

 the effects of an innocent person, that suspicion and punishment might 

 be directed toward the innocent person. These are cases out of Chris- 

 tison. That learned professor gives a word of caution against a prac- 

 tice that has received considerable laudation. Some preparation of 

 antimony "is often foolishly used, in the way of amusement, to cause 

 sickness and purging, and likewise to detect servants who are suspected 

 of making free with their mistress's tea-box or whiskey-bottle ; and in 

 both of these ways alarming effects have sometimes been produced." 



