studies, which are therefore more or less exclusively confined to the
so-called practical branches. Forensic medicine is not one of these,
poison cases are comparatively rare, and to be called upon to give a
definite opinion upon such matters before a legal tribunal happens
not once in the lifetime of most medical men. Consequently, to a great
part of the American medical profession legal medicine is a veritable
_terra incognita_.

Moreover, the whole drift of modern medicine is toward a division
of labor, and forensic medicine is more widely separated from the
ordinary specialties of the science than these are from one another.
In a case of delicate eye-surgery who would value the opinion of a
man whose attention had been devoted mainly to thoracic diseases? What
specialist of the latter character would even offer an opinion? Yet
physicians who acknowledge that they have paid no especial attention
to toxicology do not hesitate to give the most positive opinions upon
the most delicate questions of that science. Men who would, as in
honor bound, ask for a consultation in any case of serious sickness
outside of their line of private practice, on the witness-stand put
forth with the utmost boldness their ignorant crudities, careless
or forgetful of the fact that they may be imperiling the life of an
innocent human being. On the trial of Mrs. Wharton for the attempted
murder of Mr. Van Ness, Dr. Williams asserted that there are
peculiar characteristic symptoms or groups of symptoms of tartar
emetic poisoning;[13] and both he and Dr. Chew--who with frankness
acknowledged that he had not especially studied toxicology--did most
positively recognize tartar emetic as the sole possible cause of
certain symptoms which were but a little beyond the line of medicinal
action, and for which obviously possible natural cause existed.
Contrast these bold opinions with the cautious statement of a man