Introductory address to a course of lectures on forensic medicine delivered at King's College, London / by William Robert Smith.

  • Smith, William Robert, 1850-1932.
Date:
1889
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Introductory address to a course of lectures on forensic medicine delivered at King's College, London / by William Robert Smith. 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.

    18/22 (page 18)
    .Sicily by Fortunato Fidele. From 1621 to 1635 a number of suc- cessive volumes appeared entitled Quoestiones Medico-Legales, by Paulo Zacchia, which must be regarded as a land mark in the history of the subject, and which stamped its Roman author as the greatest medico-jurist of his time. These volumes display an immense amount of learning and sagacity when chemistry was in its infancy and physiology but little understood. Harvey's dis- covery of the circulation of the blood soon followed, and this gave a great impetus to the study of these branches of Forensic Medi- cine having a relationship to physiology; and to him we owe the idea how to practically apply Galen's observations on the differ- ences between foetal and adult lungs in cases of supposed infanticide. About this time two books were published by Melchior Sebiz. In the one the existence of the hymen was insisted upon as the true indication of virginity, in the other the importance of distinguishing between wounds incidentally and necessarily fatal was pointed out. About 1663 Thomas Bartholin, a Danish physician, investi- gated the period of human utero^estation, a subject which had engaged the attention of Aristotle and proposed the hydrostatic test as an evidence of live birth, which was first applied to practical use by Jan Schreyer in 1682. About the middle of the seventeenth century, Michaelis gave his first course of lectures on Medical Jurisprudence in the Univer- sity of Leipzig, which were soon followed by the lectures of Bohn, who also published a series of very valuable works, entitled De Kenunciatione Vulne:&m, Dissertationes Medicinte Forensis,'* and De Officiis Medici Duplici Clinici et Forensis.