Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 10.pdf/504

 The Medical Expert as a Witness. able doubt." For such idiotic results, the medical expert is alone responsible, and it is quite time he was given a baptism of com mon sense before being admitted to the wit ness box. No court on earth should be compelled to squander its time in balancing the respective merits of rival experts in matters involving a mere theory. That theory, while it may be right, and is quite apt to be plausible, may also be inherently vicious and unconditionally bad; and to de prive men of life and liberty on the vagaries of an " expert " is perilously close to the despotism and anarchy of the gothic ages. Leutgert is breaking down under a sentence of life imprisonment rendered on the theory that his wife's bones were found in a sausage vat, and yet some of the most eminent osteo logists of the age vehemently insist that the bones in question "belonged to a hog." Verily the gentle elegiac poet of " Dead Man's Gulch " sized up the medical expert and his perplexities, when he wrote that touching threnody on the untimely death of little Obey Dilldock : — "There was a small boy had some powder But in efforts to make it go louder, The M.D. couldn't tell The debris when it fell, From a large sized dish of clam chowder."

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We will conclude our comment with a quotation from a discriminating article in 8 Western Jurist, 131. The writer had evidently been " down to the tavern to swear at the judge," but his trip did not interfere with some very just expressions, and some equally just con clusions. "Glaring as are the mischiefs which grow out of the practical working of this system, it is exceedingly difficult to meet and coun teract them by any course of legislation. Provided his witnesses and their testimony are competent, it would not do to deny a suitor the right of selecting and taking such as he chooses, nor could the rule be changed by making a distinction between witnesses who testify as experts, and those who speak of what they know personally of the facts directly put in issue. If, therefore, there is no way of reaching the difficulty indirectly, the public must continue to witness such disgraceful exhibitions of scientific pugilism as have occurred in our courts, in which it is often difficult to determine whether, not knowing that of which he testifies, he falsi fies through ignorance, or, knowing the truth, he purposely forbears to state such parts of it as will damage the cause which he is sum moned to sustain."