On surgical evidence in courts of law : with suggestions for its improvement / by John Eric Erichsen.

  • John Eric Erichsen
Date:
1878
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On surgical evidence in courts of law : with suggestions for its improvement / by John Eric Erichsen. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    on the part of the court is felt to be a serious evil is evident from the fact that in some cases in which questions arise that require for their proper and just solution an amount of technical knowledge which an outsider, however skilled in other branches of learning, cannot be expected to possess, the court is assisted in its conduct of the case and in its judgment on it by men who have a special profes- sional knowledge of the points at issue. Thus in the Admiralty Court the judge is assisted by the Trinity Masters, in the Wreck Commissioners Court by two naval officers who act as assessors. It is felt that questions connected with the science of navigation and the practice of seamanship are too technical to be decided by a tribunal which possesses little knowledge of such matters unless assisted by men who have made the one their special study, and the other the business of their lives. But, surely, the science of navigation is not more specially difficult than that of medicine, or the practice of seamanship than the art of surgery, and yet a judge feels himself incapable, unaided, to pronounce on the one, and has no hesitation in doing so on the other. A special technical know- ledge of the question at issue is absolutely necessary in order properly to master its details, and to form a competent judgment on the opinions brought forward in support or in contradiction of it. No general soundness of judgment, no amount of general learning or even of scientific attainment in other departments, will enable a judge to decide whether a ship was on its proper course when a collision occurred, or whether a particular train of symptoms is indicative of some special pathological change in the spinal cord. These questions can only be correctly answered by those who arc specially and practically acquainted with that branch of science to which each belongs. In order to judge of the value of