Lectures on medical jurisprudence / by Francis Ogston ; edited by Francis Ogston, Jr.

  • Ogston, Francis, 1803-1887.
Date:
1878
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lectures on medical jurisprudence / by Francis Ogston ; edited by Francis Ogston, Jr. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    greater number of the medical points coming before tliem for settlement and adjudication. Now, whether in his less ambitious character as a mere observer, or in his higher position as a judge and interpreter of the value and bearing of the facts of his science, or, as usually happens, in both combined, the medical jurist has a sufficiently important part to play within the department of legal jjractice, in which his aid may be at any time sought, where legal princijDles have to be settled or legal decisions pronounced based on purely medical facts and conclusions; and beyond this the medical practitioner, in his official capacity, does not require to travel in seeking to fit him- self for such exigencies as these, a circumstance lost sight of by most of the earlier writers on medical jurisj)rudence, and which if duly attended to would also disencumber many of our existing medico-legal works of much superfluous matter having but an indirect bearing on the science which they profess to elucidate. Of this sort are many discussions on purely legal questions with which the practitioner or medical jurist, as such, has little or nothing to do, and the introduction of which could only have arisen from ignorance on the part of the expert of the practical object of his science, and the proper position he is found in practice to occupy in inquiries at law bordering on medical topics. Equally superfluous and still more mischievous are many of the details, still frequently reproduced from the older writers in our modern treatises, of medical inquiries which would now be repudiated by the existing judicatories, and the discussions of questions which are now settled on evidence, and on principles of a sort altogether foreign to those which medicine is capable of supplying. The inquiries with which the modern expert has to concern himself occupy a less extended field than was formerly believed to be the case, while the evidence required to sub- stantiate the points which they embrace is not now required to be of that strictly demonstrative character, which demanded that each single fact advanced should be incapable of explanation by any other view than the one taken of it by the witness, and thus put it out of the power of the judge or jury to arrive at moral con- viction on any point whatever, unless each and every link in the chain of proof was not only indisputable but undisputed,—a thing perfectly unattainable in such a science as medicine, in fact in any science whatever, if we except that of pure mathematics. Thus narrowed and restricted Avithin reasonable and practi- cable limits, the series of topics falling legitimately to be discussed