Medico-Legal Conflict. Any curtailment of the power of the bench has always been opposed by public opinion, even when it was aimed to take from it the power to decide questions which necessitated the greatest specialized scholarship for a correct decision. Witness the long persistent fight that had to be waged before the bench allowed itself to be deprived of its power to "punish insane criminals while, content in its erroneous assumptions, it branded idiots as malefactors and drowned old women as witches. Another fruitful source of disagreement has been the failure to clearly define the ele mentary terms used respectively by the two professions. As I have elsewhere pointed out,1 little can be accomplished until we fix the sense in which the technical terms of each profession are used. Thus the word "crime" has a distinct juridic meaning to the lawyer which is different from that given to that word by the criminologist and alienist. And so with "responsibility," "penalty," "disease," "degenerate," "moral," "premeditation," "consciousness" and many others. All these causes of disagreement can and will be overcome. There is one barrier, how ever, that appears insurmountable, as to which, while it stands, law and medicine may declare a truce, but can agree to no terms of peace; I refer to that most ancient and great est of questions—the freedom of the will. The study of man from the physiologic standpoint has an undoubted tendency to make him, in the eyes of his investigator, a creature of forces beyond its control. Man in this aspect ceases to be a free agent in the eyes of the student; mind becomes solely the product of matter and subject to its limita tions. To the alienist and psychiatrist who sees the mental power so intimately related to the physical organs and functions that injury or enfceblement of these results in mental stagnation or death, the freedom of the will must appear as pías frans. Since Broca's time the localization of brain 1 " Natural I^aw wrstts Statutory Law : " Address delivered before Society of Medical Jurisprudence, New York, 1899.
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centres has become more than a mere guess, and this alone must be a powerful argument in the hands of the psychiatrist. Hence to the studious in this field the absorbing study of such phenomena must bring them to con clusions very much at variance with those of the metaphysician and the sociologist. It will hardly be denied that the tendency of psycho-physical study of man must be towards a denial of spirit. Law, on the other hand, stands, pre-emi nently for the freedom of the will. Without this as a foundation-stone juridic science has no existence, for the very test of juridic re sponsibility is man's power of choice. To this the juridic philosopher brings the senti ment of humanity, the teachings of meta physics and the experience of history, which are repugnant to the physical measurement of the soul; he contends that after you have taken man's brain to pieces you have not yet found his mind; that molecular interaction may be demonstrated as the physical coun terpart of thought, but it is not thought. He cannot see, in the words of Professor James, "how such a thing as our conscious ness can possibly be produced by a nervous machinery," even though admitting that "if ideas do accompany the workings of the machinery, the order of the ideas might very well follow exactly the order of the machine operation." I am not taking sides on this question; I am endeavoring to present the position of each party and its sources of strength. Un less we recognize this no fair judgment can be made. This is an age of specialization, and the curse of specialization is that it dis- • torts proportions and narrows the horizon in mental life. Medicine is essentially a positive science; it is based on the observation of physical phenomena. Law is one of the humanities; it is the "witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race." (Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, of Massa chusetts.) The doctor and the jurist too
