Medical writers speak strongly against such actions. One says, “In the majority of cases these actions are the direct offspring of envy, hatred, malice and all uncharitableness, and when, rocked in the cradle of calumny and nursed by the hand of speculation, injury is often inflicted upon the character of the physician, who is at the same time left without any proper remedy at law. The effect, also, of such suits upon the public mind is apt to be pernicious, for success in obtaining damages often stimulates others into a repetition of the experiment, and the physician consequently practises his art in chains, being perpetually exposed to the risk of a suit, which may ruin his reputation as well as his fortune. It becomes lawyers, therefore, to consider, when called upon to institute such suits, that little value can be placed on the _ipse dixit_ of a layman sitting as critic upon the professional conduct of a physician. And that, aside from such personal delinquencies as drunkenness, or gross negligence, cruelty towards, or abandonment of his patient, the field in which the physician discharges his professional duties is practically _terra incognita_ to the unlearned, and one where no lay critic can follow him” [187]. The same critic points out that the majority of suits for malpractice have been brought against surgeons and not against physicians. “Failure is rarely excused in a surgeon. He is expected to be an adroit medical carpenter who, with knife and saw and splint, can so re-construct the fractured or disjointed members of the human body as to leave no mark or line as evidence of their previous |78| disruption. On the other hand, the physician, enshrined within the penetralia of his mystic art, and mounted upon a Delphic tripod, inaccessible to vulgar criticism, pronounces his diagnosis and formulizes his prescriptions with unquestioned judgment. His diagnosis may be faulty, his medicines ill-selected, or ill-timed in their administration, and still no blame be incurred by him for any evil consequences that may ensue. For who will presume to say, in case of the patient’s death, that he had not naturally reached that last illness foreordained to all men, and of which the physician’s unsuccessful treatment is only official testimony? Who knows, in fact, when a man has reached his last illness until he dies? * * * And, as a corollary to this, strange as it may seem, one might, through unskilfulness, sacrifice a human life with more impunity than he could mutilate or deform a toe or a finger” [188].