come into fierce collision; there is the conflict of medical testimony, and the common-sense of judge and jury is frequently insulted. It would be a golden rule for a medical man never to use a scientific term if a popular term would serve his use as well. The medical man not only states facts, but obtrudes his explanations and theories about them, and does so in highly technical language. The legal mind revolts against the assumption of the medical mind, and in this way much prejudice is done to science. The lawyers are pretty unanimous in holding that a medical man is the worst possible witness. He cannot plead privilege, like the lawyer or the confessor, and his best plan is to tell his story at once, in the most intelligible and straightforward way that he can. The eminent German physician, Caspar, who for many years was forensic physician to the Berlin justiciary courts, is very severe upon medical witnesses: "How often have I heard physicians talking to the judge and jury of 'excited sensibility,' 'reflex movements,' 'coma,' 'idiopathic,' etc., without for one minute considering that they were using words and expressions wholly unintelligible to unprofessional parties!" Caspar's work is a perfect thesaurus of odd incidents and cases; and, if read, it ought to be compared with Taylor's "Medical Jurisprudence," that we may compare the difference between the English and the Prussian systems. The Prussian plan of having an accredited medical officer attached to a court, who in some sort of way is a minister of justice, is certainly an improvement on a scene not infrequently witnessed in English courts, where a criminal trial is turned into an arena for the conflict of scientific testimony.
If you take the volumes of Caspar, and Prof. Taylor's book, and throw in a little more sparkling literature, like "Christison on Poisons"—Christison, like the Fat Boy, will make your flesh creep—you will have the materials—a veritable huge quarry—out of which you may hammer all kinds of sensational and romantic stories. You may read up the murderers, just as old Boffin read up the misers. There is the eccentric Miss Blandy, of Oxfordshire, who poisoned her father as a means for promoting her matrimonial projects; the highly luxurious and wealthy people who have tried to poison, not with vulgar lead and arsenic, but with silver and gold; the aberrant wife who poured poison down her husband's open mouth as he was sleeping. Then there are cases where a three-volume plot might easily be elaborated—where a man or woman had actually taken poison, and secreted poison about the effects of an innocent person, that suspicion and punishment might be directed toward the innocent person. These are cases out of Christison. That learned professor gives a word of caution against a practice that has received considerable laudation. Some preparation of antimony "is often foolishly used, in the way of amusement, to cause sickness and purging, and likewise to detect servants who are suspected of making free with their mistress's tea-box or whiskey-bottle; and in both of these ways alarming effects have sometimes been produced."
