A treatise on medical jurisprudence / by Francis Wharton and Moreton Stillé.

  • Wharton, Francis, 1820-1889.
Date:
1855
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on medical jurisprudence / by Francis Wharton and Moreton Stillé. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    paration of the first and sixth books, embracing Mental Unsoundness and the Legal Relations of Homicide, together with the general disqui- sition on Indicatory Evidence with which the latter book concludes. Of the manner in which was performed at least a portion of the task whose history is now given, it may not be unsuitable for the writer who now survives to speak. It was to the preparation of this portion that the last year of Dr. Stilles short but distinguished professional career was given. It was a year of patient and severe research, marked, to an extent of which the annals of science afford few parallels, by the most self-denying industry, as well as by a rigorous and almost fastidious conscientiousness in the pursuit, not only of truth, but of the most ap- propriate terms by which that truth could be expressed. And the labor was not one which derived any portion of its severity from the want of prior preparation. Dr. Stille had not only enjoyed great opportunities for literary and professional culture, but what is rarer, these opportunities were faithfully improved. The liberalizing influences of European cul- ture, as well as the simpler discipline of home instruction, passed not over him in vain. The schools of Europe received from him in the prime of his early manhood the same single and conscientious attention as the schools of Philadelphia in his youth. He found the pleasures of travel and the desultory influences of foreign habits of no more avail in drawing him from a laborious personal attendance on the hospitals— those great repositories of disease which, in the development of God's wonderful providence, are made the arsenals which supply the weapons by which the maladies that necessitate them are to be combated—than he found the more primitive habits and more limited associations of his native city. The great continental tongues, in their scientific as well as their popular relations, were mastered by him to a completeness of which, among persons of his age, we have rare examples. Few men, even among the most mature, have gone to the grave so richly fraught with the literature of a profession, which to him was a philosophy as well as an art. And few, at so early age, have gone to the grave with faculties under more complete moral discipline. To one of his most remarkable qualities,—that delicate and yet modest firmness of perception which, unwarped on the one side by pride in his own opin- ion, or on the other by undue deference to that of others, enabled him, after the most diflicult and subtile research, not only to reach but to ex- press the truth—no one has had better cause to testify than the present writer. The.work which these lines now close was one which brought both of those who engaged in it into the most intimate and affectionate personal intercourse for many months; and the one who survives can now