In either event he must answer criminally for his act. The other kind is where a physician was not sufficiently skilled in deal ing with dangerous medicines which should be carefully used, of the properties of which he was ignorant or how to administer a proper dose. A person who with ignorant rashness and without skill in his profession used such a dangerous medicine acted in gross negligence. A person who took a leap in the dark in the administration of medicine was guilty of gross negligence. It is one thing, however, to catch your criminal healer and another thing to put him beyond range of making future experiments upon human life. The burden of proving the gross negligence, the leap in the dark, will be upon the people, upon those who make the accusation. The accused will be presumed to be innocent. Parenthetically it may be added that there is nothing so presumptuous as ignorance. The attitude of the courts in England and this country on this subject are illustrated in two cases somewhat similar. The former held that if a person, not having a medical education, and in a place where persons of a medical education might be obtained, takes upon himself to administer medicine which may have a dangerous effect, and such per son destroys the life of a person to whom it is administered, it is manslaughter. The party may not mean to cause death, on the contrary he may mean to produce beneficial effects, but he has no right to hazard medi cine of a dangerous tendency when medical assistance can be obtained. If he does, he does it at his peril. In this country it was said that if a person assume to act as a physician, however igno rant of medicine or science, and prescribe with an honest intention of curing the pa tient, but through ignorance of the quality of the medicine prescribed, or of the nature of the disease or both, the patient die in con sequence of the treatment, contrary to the expectation of the person prescribing, he is not guilty of murder or manslaughter, but if
the party prescribing has so much knowledge of the fatal tendency of the prescription, that it may reasonably be presumed that he ad ministered the medicine from an obstinate, willful rashness, and not with an honest in tention and expectation of effecting a cure, he is guilty of manslaughter at least, though he might not have intended any bodily harm to the patient. It would seem that the law of this land is drifting nearer the Englishman's point of view than the above western idea. The American Court evidently had in mind more of the definition of murder than manslaughter. A person ignorant of medicine who should un dertake to prescribe and thereby kill would surely be in the same boat with the one who picked up the same old revolver which was supposed to be minus a load, to have it go ! off and kill. There would be no intention of killing in either case. There would, how ever, be such a wanton and gross negligence both in the pointing of the revolver and pre scription, that when the going off of the one would produce the same result as the other, it would be a singular distinction to have the performance in one case called by a different name than in the other. These cases suggest a legal riddle. Sup pose you or I should turn missionary and journey to some heathen land, if we could find any such in the Twentieth Century. Suppose we take along a case of medicine about which we know nothing, to catch and heal their bodies, while we are proselyting for their souls. Suppose we have the only medical chest in that heathen land and no other medical assistance can be obtained. Suppose we hazard the medicine in our laudable purposes and launch into the here after half of the tribe we went out to save. How would our act be construed, if we es caped the other half of the tribe with our life? Yould we be guiltless because there was no other medically educated dispenser of medi cine in the neighborhood, or would it be manslaughter? We are not anxious for an immediate re
