"PHYSICIANS—EXPERT WITNESSES ". SOME REFORMS.
Address delivered before the Kansas City Academy of Medicine, Kansas City, Feb. 25, 1899.BY HENRY WOLLMAN, Esq.Of the Kansas City Bar.KANSAS CITY, MO.Human testimony is extraordinarily fallible, and judges and experienced lawyers do not permit it, when segregated from the probabilities, from letters, papers, documents and the physical facts, to determine them in their decision as to what is right and what is wrong. But the public—more confiding, more trusting, less observant, far less experienced—does have a very high opinion of the correctness and truthfulness of testimony given in court, but never when it comes to the testimony of experts. That is the subject of everybody's sneer, and the object of everybody's derision. It has become a newspaper jest. The public has no confidence in expert testimony.In discussing expert testimony, I shall, however, confine myself to the expert testimony of physicians