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The Doctor in the Witness-box

1953; BMJ; Volume: 2; Issue: 4826 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1136/bmj.2.4826.1

0959-8138

V. Simon,

Digital Imaging in Medicine

I feel greatly honoured by being invited to deliver the annual Cavendish Lecture to the West London Medico- Chirurgical Society, and I am much interested in the reason why the lecture is so called.Like the splendid Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, to which the developments of modern science, including radar and nuclear physics, owe so much, and which is glorified by the names of Kelvin and Clerk-Maxwell and Ruther- ford and J. J. Thomson, its title serves to commemorate that remarkable man of science Henry Cavendish- " natural philosopher," as he was called in the early days of the Royal Society-whose discoveries in chemistry and physics in the eighteenth century rank so high.The West London Hospital was built near his house, where he pursued his studies-a lonely and retiring bachelor, who accumulated and left in his will over a million pounds, and who avoided all companionship, ordering his dinner by a note left on his hall table, while his female domestic servants had orders to keep out of his sight, on pain of instant dismissal.He was a member of the Royal Society, and communicated to that learned body the results of his investigations, including the famous " Cavendish experiment," which measured the pull of gravity and helped to determine the density of the globe.A former Lord Chancellor, the omniscient Lord Brougham, who desired to show himself in his old age a man of science and an author no less than a lawyer, in his Sketches of Statesmen and Philosophers describes how he met Cavendish at meetings of the Royal Society, how Cavendish avoided all conversation, and how " he probably uttered fewer words in the course of his life than any man who ever lived to four-score years "-a record of non-volubility worthy of a Trappist monk, which neither Lord Brougham nor any subsequent octogenarian ex-Lord Chancellor can claim to have equalled.When a former Duke of Devonshire, him- self the head of the Cavendish family, was the first President of the West London Hospital, he urged that something should be done to associate Henry Caven- dish's name with the hospital, and this lecture is one of the results.Reflecting on the task of preparing this lecture and on the situations when law and medicine meet one another, I have chosen as the title of my discourse " The Doctor in the Witness-box," and I propose to make a few *The Cavendish Lecture given before the West London Medico- Chirurgical Society on May 11.