After decades of Quincy and all the Law & Order and CSI spinoffs, it’s difficult to imagine that there was once a time when medical or other forensic evidence was new and even controversial in criminal courts. But doctors weren’t always welcome as expert witnesses. They had to first convince the courts—and the public—to accept them and take them seriously.
The “historical animosity between the professions of law and medicine” was quite real, writes historian Kelly-Ann Couzens. Exploring how doctors became a standard feature in the witness box in Scotland, Couzens tracks the process through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “Many medical practitioners felt heavily the burden of entering the courtroom as expert witnesses. Some did so most unwillingly. Others did so in ignorance of the challenges they faced and the skills they required,” she writes.
But Scottish medical schools quickly learned to train doctors in presentation and performance skills. Successive Regius Professors of Medical Jurisprudence at the University of Edinburgh were also patrons of the performing arts, choral singers (“The Singing Doctors”), and renowned for their oratory skills—one was even a poet.
More to Explore
The Mystery of Crime-Scene Dust
“Increasing emphasis was placed on the more intangible and subtle lessons of how to ‘persuade’ the court and public of the competence, amiability and respectability of the medical man his right to claim expert status within the courtroom,” Couzens writes.
So, it wasn’t just what they said in court, but how they said it. Dress, deportment, and public speaking were all stressed. “Avoid using technical expressions” and skip the metaphors, instructed one lecturer in 1880. Listening to a talk on appropriate court behavior in 1908, a student noted “you wait about till called in & when you appear see that you are dressed well, leave your hat and umbrella outside.” Nearly six decades later, A Doctors Guide to Court (1962) reiterated the advice of leaving all “encumbrances” outside the courtroom or at least away from the witness box. This work also recommended that the doctor-witness “not lounge with the hands in the pockets or wrap yourself over the edge of the [witness] box.”
Scottish murder trials were focuses of intense interest as well as somber legal proceedings. “Poisonings were guaranteed to be especially popular,” with the press reporting details far and wide for those who hadn’t gotten to court. (William Roughead, said to have attended every major murder trial in the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh between 1889 and 1949, wrote memorably of these “classic crimes.”)
“Defendants and spectators actively engaged” in the proceedings, continues Couzens, making the courtrooms “localities of cheer, disorder and dispute as much as places of solemnity and order.” Medical witnesses needed to be on the ball. Some became virtual celebrities: when Sir Henry Littlejohn was called to the witness box in an 1897 murder trial, he was greeted with a round of applause, much to the annoyance of the judges and the court reporter. The judges were also performing, of course: when a doctor’s testimony in a notorious 1889 murder trial got confusingly technical, the Lord Justice-Clerk hinted that the introduced terms were “greek to them.”
“In the Scottish courtroom if a witness had the skill and confidence, humor and theatricality could be invaluable dramatic aids for emerging from the scrap of the adversarial trial unscathed,” Couzens writes.
Weekly Newsletter
Adversarial trials are inherently dramatic. Little wonder so many dramas, for theater and screen, have taken place in fictional courtrooms. Meanwhile, a century or more after those Scottish doctors learned how to present testimony, the medical examiner/coroner/forensics expert has become a stock figure of entertainment. It could be argued that they all are just an update on Sherlock Holmes, and just as realistic. For in real life, medical and other forensic evidence is far from foolproof or unambiguous. DNA isn’t quite the gold standard of evidence it’s sometimes made out to be. The “science” in forensic science isn’t necessarily as scientific as popular culture has it.
The “CSI Effect,” which suggests jurors may have unreasonable expectations about forensics may be more anecdotal than measurable, but it’s certainly talked about in actual courthouses. Or, as the judge ruefully says to those in the jury box at the start of a murder trial, “This won’t be like the things you see on television; try to forget all that.”
Support JSTOR Daily! Join our membership program on Patreon today.
