“SIMPLE AND HONEST MEN.”

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20644, 16 February 1929, Page 27

“SIMPLE AND HONEST MEN.”

MEDICAL AND LEGAL MINDS. DOCTORS TELL THE TRUTH. (From Odr Own Correspondent.! LONDON, December 21. At the annual dinner of the MedicoLegal Society (Sir William H. Willcox in the chair), Mr Justice Branson, toasting “The -Medico-Legal Society,” remarked that the work of both professions, the medical and the legal, was to weigh the evidence of things they could see and hear in order to lead them to a knowledge of things they could neither see nor hear. The great value of the society was that they got different kinds of minds rubbing up against one another, and he hoped and trusted that each one would find, after the rubbing process had been gone through, that he went away with a great many corners very much reduced.

The chairman, in responding, said there were few departments of human endeavour which were not associated in some way wth medicine and the law. One of the objects of the society was to bring into harmony the two professions. Doctors as a rule had a rigid objection to going into the witness box, and they looked with suspicion on the lawyer who was to cross-examine them.

“ Doctors are simple and honest men. They invariably endeavour to give their evidence without bias, and to tell the truth. The lawyer requires understanding. A doctor cannot appreciate how one lawyer will make out a ease eloquently in favour of his client and show that his client is an angel, while another lawyer comes to quite the opposite concluson in most eloquent language and paints the same person as a devil. That, to the medical mind, is somewhat difficult to appreciate.”