Address on the progress and dignity of the medical profession : delivered before the trustees, faculty, students and friends of the Starling Medical College at its annual commencement, February 17, 1849 / by B.T. Cushing.

  • Cushing, B. T.
Date:
1849
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Address on the progress and dignity of the medical profession : delivered before the trustees, faculty, students and friends of the Starling Medical College at its annual commencement, February 17, 1849 / by B.T. Cushing. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    of dispute whether the body of a person committing suicide would not sink in the water, whilst a body thrown in, after death by violence, would float!* The professional opinions given on both sides were enough to puzzle alike the attorney for the crown, the judge and the jury. Other cases are on record where the ablest physicians in England were called upon to give opinions as to the signs of drowning, and differed on questions which any county practitioner in our State ought to be ashamed not now to understand. Yet these were the men whose opinions bore the fiat of life and death! But the progress of Medical Jurisprudence can be more fully illustrated from the calendar of in- sanity. Here indeed, the student of legal lore grows sick with horror, as he reads case after case where men have been hung, for no earthly reason, save because God had afflicted them with madness! Lord Coke's definition of the four grades of non compotes mentis, shows the low ebb of knowledge in his day upon this important subject. He describes them as—1st, An idiot who from his nativity by a perpetual infirmity is non compos. 2d, He that by sickness, grief or other accident, wholly loscth his memory and understanding. 3d, A lunatic that hath sometimes his understanding and sometimes not: aliquando qaudet lucidis intervallis; and therefore he is called non compos mentis, so long as he hath not understanding. 4th, He that by his own vicious act, for a time depriveth himself of his memo- ry and understanding, as he that is drunken. j* An idiot was defined to be a person who cannot count twenty pence, or tell who was his father and mother, * See Hargrare'i St. Trials and Life of Lord Cowper. f Co. Litt., 847 (a.)