Origin and progress of medical jurisprudence, 1776-1876 : a centennial address / by Stanford E. Chaillé.

  • Chaillé, Stanford Emerson, 1830-1911.
Date:
1876
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Origin and progress of medical jurisprudence, 1776-1876 : a centennial address / by Stanford E. Chaillé. 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.

    10/42 (page 10)
    quately the number of citizens whose welfare is involved, and the extent to which society is interested in the efficient application of medical knowledge to the administ ration of justice. Now, what are the methods which Anglo-American law adopts to secure in practice that “ best attainable evidence” which in theory it demands ? It entrusts medico-legal autopsies, which require special medical and some legal knowledge,to those having neither the one nor the other, except by accident; for, these coroners (whose inexperience our law insures by constant “rotation in office”) owe their position wholly to political popularity, a qualification which a competent expert is most unlikely to possess. Are these unqualified officials supplied with efficient aid ! If so, again by accident, since the law leaves it to chance, or the coroner, or to his still less qualified jury, to provide a medical expert; and, as is usual, accident and ignorance provide inexperience and incompetence. Could ingenuity devise for medico-legal autopsies any methods more inefficient than these, which Anglo-American laws, framed before the birth of Medical Jurisprudence, have barbarously per- petuated V On this Pelion of inefficiency our legislative giants have piled an Ossa of absurdity; for, besides these fatal defects in the primary legal pro- ceedings, Anglo-American law, in order to secure “the best attainable evidence” for its courts, where poverty and dishonor as well as the halter are administered to the free citizen, clings to a method as sadly ludicrous as it is antiquated. To plaintiff and defendant the law gives full license to summon such medical witnesses as each has already found reason to following facts as to New Orleans, La., for the year 1875. The total number of coroner’s views and inquests was 1026; of these there were 268 inquests, and out of these grew 47 trials. Giving New Orleans 210,000 and the United States 40,000,000 population, the New Orleans statistics would indicate for the United States annually 8952 medico-iegal criminal trials, growing out of 51,047 medicO-legal autopsies, or coroner’s inquests. 1 Convincing reasons could be given in proof that the duties of coroners are discharged even worse in the United States than in England. The follow'ing facts indicate how the Anglo-American method works in the latter country. An. Englishman wTrites (1876): “ The coroner is elected for life by the rate-payers of his district [a superiority over the American method], and he is paid a good salary out of the county rates. In most cases he is a medical man who has studied the arts of popularity with more success than those of medicine, or he is a small country attorney who has failed in the higher paths of his profes- sion.” Dr. Wm. Farr officially reported as to England in 1868 : When all the verdicts of . coroners “ for the first time came under review [another great superiority over the American lack of any such system], they were not at all creditable to the intelligence of the country. They conveyed the least possible information in the vaguest possible words.” Prof. A. S. Taylor wrote in 1873: “ The coroner’s inquest affords no certainty for the detection of crime. It, in some instances, tends to screen a criminal.” “ In the course of thirty years’ practice, at legst fifteen cases of the exhumation of dead bodies were referred to me. On some of these inquests had been held, but no inspections were made. Verdicts of death from cholera or natural causes had been returned, and at intervals of from one to twenty- two months the bodies have been disinterred, and it was then proved that the deceased per- sons had died from poison.” (See B. 358, I. p. 12.) The British Medical Journal (Jan. 1876) reports a glaring case of poisoning, undetected by the incompetent coroner. National attention was recently attracted to the same monstrous evil in the inquest of a Mr. Bravo. An English writer asserts that “ almost every day, from all parts of England tales come up of the inadequacy and absurdity of the institution. Notice has been given to-day [May 23d, 1876] in the House of Commons, by an independent member on the ministerial side, that he will call attention to the office of coroner at an early day.” Other facts indicate that England recognizes this evil better than does the United States, and therefore will probably correct it sooner. July. 1876, it was reported that “ the practice of electing coro- ners has been condemned in the House of Commons by a unanimous vote. A bill for the reform of the office of coroner is soon to be brought in.” See also B. 259, 274, aud 330.