upon made an assault upon this defendant and upon his dog, which was providentially present, and threw and impelled a stone at the latter, whereupon the said dog, in self-defence, as he lawfully might for the cause aforesaid, instinctively resented the attack upon himself, and playfully and slightly inserted his teeth in and upon the person of the plaintiff, doing him no unnecessary damage, nor any damage beyond what was good for him: which are the same supposed trespasses alleged in the complaint."
The plea prevailed.
The "Medical and Surgical Reporter" dishonors the medical profession by coming to the rescue of the doctors who cut open Bishop, the mind-reader, before he had been apparently dead six hours, and by supporting its defence of their conduct by such paragraphs as the following:—
"Besides this, if they had made the mistake with which a grief-stricken mother has charged them, they could not have been in doubt in regard to the matter as soon as they opened the thorax and abdomen of the subject. In the thorax they would have found the heart beating, and in the abdomen the intestines would probably have manifested vermiform contractions under the stimulus of the air or the mechanical conditions of the operation. But with these and other means of knowing what they did, the physicians who conducted the autopsy declare that there were no signs of life in the body; and they do this with the manner of men conscious of being right, and not of men endeavoring to hide an appalling blunder. For these reasons we think no medical man will hesitate to accept their statement, or fail to sympathize with them as they protest against the clamor excited by the horrible suspicion which has been raised in the minds of the general public."
It may be true that "no medical man will hesitate to accept" the statement of the doctors who did the cutting, that they found no signs of life in the thorax and abdomen, after they had so far cut the patient that if he had been alive their cutting must have produced his death; but no lawyer or judge accustomed to deal with evidence would pay the slightest attention to such a statement. There is not one medical man in a thousand, probably not one in the whole profession, that would confess to the finding of signs of life under such circumstances.
Recent Deaths
Judge R. S. Williamson, of the Circuit Court of Cook County, Ill., died at his home in Palatine, August 10, 1889. Judge Williamson was born in Cornwall, Addison County, Vt., May 23, 1839, and was admitted to the bar in 1870. He was for a number of years a member of the law firm of Miller, Williamson, & Miller. He was afterward the senior member of the firm of Williamson & Cutting. He was elected a member of the lower house of the Illinois General Assembly in 1870, and State Senator in 1872. In 1880 he was elected to the Superior Court bench, and served one term of six years. Two years ago he was chosen one of the six new circuit judges.
Hon. William Emery, a prominent citizen of Alfred, Me., died August 31, aged sixty-five. He was prominent in business and political circles, had been representative to the Legislature, county attorney of York County, and was the Democratic candidate for Congress against Thomas B. Reed in the first Maine district last year.
Col. Thomas J. Evans, one of the best-known lawyers in Virginia, died September 20, aged sixty-seven. He had represented Richmond twice as a member of the Legislature. He was a colonel in the Confederate army and a prominent Mason.
Philemon Bliss, ex-justice of the Supreme Court of Missouri and dean of the Missouri University, died at St. Paul, August 25, aged seventy-six. Judge Bliss was one of the early anti-slavery leaders of Ohio, and was a member of Congress from the Fourteenth District from 1855 until 1859. He was first chief-justice of Dakota.
Abraham Browning, one of the oldest and best-known lawyers in New Jersey, died at his home in Camden on the 22d of August, aged eighty-one. He was admitted to the bar in Philadelphia in 1834, and in the same year was admitted to the bar of New Jersey. From that time on, until failing health obliged him to relinquish his profession, he was engaged in constant practice of the law at Camden.
