Moral Principles and Medical Practice | Page 3

special benefactor.
Whatever practical arrangements may be necessary or excusable in
special circumstances, this is the ideal which makes the medical
profession so honorable in society.
3. From these and many other considerations that might be added, it is
evident, gentlemen, that in the pursuit of the distinguished career for
which you are preparing, you are expected to make yourselves the
benefactors of your fellow-men. Now, in order to do so, it will not
suffice for you to understand the nature of the various diseases which
flesh is heir to, together with the specific powers of every drug
described in works on materia medica. The knowledge of anatomy and
surgery, and of the various branches that are taught by the many
professors with whom I have the honor of being associated in the work
of your medical education, no matter how fully that knowledge be
mastered, is not sure by itself to make you benefactors to your
fellow-men, unless your conduct in the management of all your
resources of science and art be directed to procure the real welfare of
your patients. Just as a skilful politician may do more harm than good
to his country if he direct his efforts to improper ends, or make use of
disgraceful means; as a dishonest lawyer may be more potent for the
perversion than the maintenance of justice among his fellow-citizens;
so likewise an able physician may abuse the beneficent resources of his
profession to procure inferior advantages at the sacrifice of moral rights
and superior blessings.
Your career, gentlemen, to be truly useful to others and pursued with
safety and benefit to yourselves, needs to be directed by a science
whose principles it will be my task to explain in this course of

lectures--the science of MEDICAL JURISPRUDENCE.
It is the characteristic of science to trace results to their causes. The
science of Jurisprudence investigates the causes or principles of law. It
is defined as "the study of law in connection with its underlying
principles." Medical Jurisprudence, in its wider sense, comprises two
departments, namely, the study of the laws regarding medical practice,
and, more, especially, the study of the principles on which those laws
are founded, and from which they derive their binding power on the
human conscience. The former department, styled Medical Law, is
assigned in the Prospectus of this College to a gentleman of the legal
profession. He will acquaint you with the laws of the land, and of this
State in particular, which regulate the practice of medicine; he will
explain the points on which a Doctor may come in contact with the law
courts, either as a practitioner having to account for his own actions,
under a charge of malpractice perhaps, or as an expert summoned as a
witness before a court in matters of civil contests or criminal
prosecutions. His field is wide and important, but the field of Medical
Jurisprudence, in its stricter or more specific sense, is wider still and its
research much deeper: it considers those principles of reason that
underlie the laws of the land, the natural rights and duties which these
laws are indeed to enforce to some extent, but which are antecedent and
superior to all human laws, being themselves founded on the essential
and eternal fitness of things. For things are not right or wrong simply
because men have chosen to make them so. You all understand,
gentlemen, that, even if we were living in a newly discovered land,
where no code of human laws had yet been adopted, nor courts of
justice established, nor civil government organized, still even there
certain acts of Doctors, as of any other men, would be right and
praiseworthy, and others wrong and worthy of condemnation; even
there Doctors and patients and their relatives would have certain rights
and duties.
In such a land, the lecturer on Medical Law would have nothing to
explain; for there would be no human laws and law courts with which a
physician could come in contact. But the lecturer on Medical
Jurisprudence proper would have as much to explain as I have in this

country at present; because he treats of the Ethics or moral principles of
Medical Practice, he deals with what is ever the same for all men
where-ever they dwell, it being consequent on the very nature of man
and his essential relations to his Maker and his fellow-man.
Unfortunately the term "Medical Jurisprudence" has been generally
misused. Dr. Ewell, in his text-book on the subject, writes "While the
term 'Medical Jurisprudence' is a misnomer,--the collection of facts and
conclusions usually passing by that name being principally only
matters of evidence, and rarely rules of law,--still the term is so
generally employed that it would be idle to attempt to bring into use a
new