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