An analysis of medical evidence: comprising directions for practitioners, in the view of becoming witnesses in Courts of Justice; and an appendix of professional testimony / By John Gordon Smith, M.D.

  • John Gordon Smith
Date:
1825
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An analysis of medical evidence: comprising directions for practitioners, in the view of becoming witnesses in Courts of Justice; and an appendix of professional testimony / By John Gordon Smith, M.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Those who do imbibe any feelings, or ac- quire any rules of conduct, springing from an acquaintance with that important branch of medical economy, do so—not in the schools,—but amid the rubs and perplexities of life, under the tuition of that stern and unmitigating preceptor—Necessity. Whether the relations of medical science to the exigencies of public justice, and other departments of state economy, may with propriety be ranked under the head of Ethics, I shall not stop to inquire*: but they have, in this country, been treated with simi- lar neglect ; whereby medicine has received much unjust reproach, and those who have been called from among her ranks, to apply those relations, have been unnecessarily low- ered in the estimation of the world. I am far from insinuating that this has been the case without exception; but I fear not to assert, that the instances in which medical witnesses have come down from any judicial examination of importance, without suffering more or less injury, have not been many, — that those in which credit has been actually * Dr. Percival has so ranked them in his delightful little work, entitled “‘ Medical Ethics, or a Code of Institutes and Precepts, adapted to the Professional Conduct of Physicians and Surgeons,” &c.
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