APPENDIX. 195 



doubts about the matter at issue, it is his duty to express 

 them, and not allow them to be extorted from him piecemeal 

 by a series of questions. 



The replies should be made in simple language, free from 

 technicality. If medical men could be made aware of the 

 ridicule which they thus bring on their evidence, otherwise 

 good, they would at once strive to dispense with such lan- 

 guage. A witness is perhaps unconsciously led to speak as 

 if he were addressing a medical debating club, instead of 

 plain men like the members of a common jury, who are 

 wholly ignorant of the meaning of medical terms, and 

 barristers who are but imperfectly acquainted with them. 

 There are few Assizes which do not afford many illustrations 

 of the injury done to scientific evidence and the clear under- 

 standing of a case, by the technical language in which it is 

 given. A Court may be told that the " integuments were 

 reflected from the thorax, and the costal cartilages laid bare, 

 when a wound was found which had penetrated through the 

 anterior mediastinnm^^'' and had involved the arch of the 

 aorta, etc. A simple cut in the skin is described as '' an 

 incision in the integuments." In a case of alleged child 

 murder, a medical witness being asked for a plain opinion 

 of the cause of death, said that it was owing " to atelectasis 

 and a general engorgement of the pulmonary tissue."' On a 

 trial for an assault which took place at the Assizes, some 

 years since, a surgeon, in giving his evidence, informed the 

 Court that, on examining the prosecutor, he found him 

 suffering from a severe contusion of the integuments under 

 the left orbit, with great extravasation of blood and ecchy- 

 mosis in the surrounding cellular tissue, which was in a 

 tumefied state. There was also considerable abrasion of the 

 cuticle. " yndg-e : You mean, I suppose, that the man had 

 a bad black eye.? Witness: Yes. Judge: Then wh)^ not 

 say so at once ?" 



This is not science but pedantry, and if such language is 



