Moral Principles and Medical Practice | Page 5

of the best counsel that can reasonably be obtained.
5. A second principle of Ethics in medical practice, gentlemen, is this, that many human acts may be highly criminal of which, however, human laws and courts take no notice whatsoever. In this matter I am not finding fault with human legislation. The laws of the land, considering the end and the nature of civil government, need take no cognizance of any but overt acts; a man's heart may be a very cesspool of vice, envy, malice, impurity, pride, hatred, etc., yet human law does not and ought not to punish him for this, as long as his actions do not disturb the public peace nor trench upon the happiness of his neighbor. Even his open outward acts which injure only himself, such as gluttony, blasphemy, impiety, private drunkenness, self-abuse, even seduction and fornication, are not usually legislated against or punished in our courts. Does it follow that they are innocent acts and lawful before God? No man in his right senses will say so.
The goodness and the evil of human acts is not dependent on human legislation alone; in many cases the moral good or evil is so intrinsic to the very nature of the acts that God Himself could not change the radical difference between them. Thus justice, obedience to lawful authority, gratitude to benefactors, are essentially good; while injustice, disobedience, and ingratitude are essentially evil. Our reason informs us of this difference; and our reason is nothing else than our very nature as intelligent beings capable of knowing truth. The voice of our reason or conscience is the voice of God Himself, who speaks through the rational nature that He has made. Through our reason God not only tells us of the difference between good and evil acts, but He also commands us to do good and avoid evil;--to do certain acts because they are proper, right, orderly, suitable to the end for which we are created; and to avoid other acts because they are improper, wrong, disorderly, unsuitable to the end of our existence. There is a third class of acts, which, in themselves, are indifferent, i.e., neither good nor evil, neither necessary for our end nor interfering with its attainment. These we are free to do or to omit as we prefer; but even these become good and even obligatory when they are commanded by proper authority, and they become evil when forbidden. In themselves, they are indifferent acts.
6. These explanations are not mere abstractions, gentlemen, or mere philosophical speculations. True, my subject is philosophical; but it is the philosophy of every-day life; we are dealing with live issues which give rise to the gravest discussions of your medical journals; issues on which practically depend the lives of thousands of human beings every year, issues which regard physicians more than any other class of men, and for the proper consideration of which Doctors are responsible to their conscience, to human society, and to their God. To show you how we are dealing with present live issues, let me give you an example of a case in point. In the "Medical Record," an estimable weekly, now in almost the fiftieth year of its existence, there was lately carried on a lengthy and, in some of its parts, a learned discussion, regarding the truth of the principles which I have just now explained, namely, the intrinsic difference between right and wrong, independently of the ruling of law courts and of any human legislation. The subject of the discussion was the lawfulness in any case at all of performing craniotomy, or of directly destroying the life of the child by any process whatever, at the time of parturition, with the intention of saving the life of the mother.
I will not examine this important matter in all its bearings at present; I mean to take it up later on in our course, and to lay before you the teachings of science on this subject, together with the principles on which they are based. For the present I will confine myself to the point we are treating just now, namely, the existence of a higher law than that of human tribunals, the superiority of the claims of natural to those of legal justice. Some might think, at first sight, that this needs no proof. In fact we are all convinced that human laws are often unjust, or, at least, very imperfect, and therefore they cannot be the ultimate test or fixed standard of right and wrong; yet the main argument advanced by one of the advocates of craniotomy rests upon the denial of a higher law, and the assertion of the authority of human tribunals as final in such matters.
In the "Medical Record" for July?27, 1895, p.?141, this gentleman writes in defence