Note 15 — MEDICAL EXPERT EVIDENCE.
Reading edition
Footnote 15:
(return)
A very forcible illustration occurs to me from my own experience. I was once summoned to see a woman in the Philadelphia Hospital to whom an assistant nurse of bad character had been seen to administer laudanum. At the time of my arrival she was apparently suffering from the advanced stages of opium poisoning. I spent about five hours in trying to restore her. The nurse protested that she had given only the medicinal dose ordered by the doctor, but was not believed. After death we found thrombosis of the brain—a rare affection, leaving such minute traces behind it that a careless examination will always fail to detect them. This was one of the affections which, as I had stated on the witness-stand some months before the occurrence just narrated, might have caused the death of Miss Stennecke with symptoms resembling those of opium poisoning.