The Wheeling Daily Register

THE DOCTORS STANDING ON THEIR RIGHTS.

The Fairmont Index is indignant at the refusal of two Wheeling physicians to testify as experts in the case of the State against Cartwright in the Circuit Court of Marion county, without compensation. The position taken by the physicians in this case raises some very nice questions as to the position the medical fraternity occupy towards the public. The motion of the counsel for the defense was to compel the physicians to testify, but this motion was overruled by the court, and the counsel saved their exception. The two physicians in question took the position that it was through years of study, costing them time and money, that they became experts in their profession, and consequently that the courts had no right to exact their services in this respect without guaranteeing an ample remuneration. In this position they are sustained by the medical society of Ohio county. Arguments may be found to support both sides of the proposition. The medical profession is a very old one; there were doctors in the early ages of the world; they may not have been regular graduates, but still they were doctors. They were known as a class of medicine men. At least it was so as early as the reign of the Pharaohs. But from that time down through all succeeding history there is no evidence that the profession was ever a close corporation. As a class they have been more useful to the race than any other profession; and because of their services and intimate relation to the great mass of the people, they are more influential. Yet it has never been contended, so far as we know, that they were ever accorded exclusive privileges.

It is submitted that a physician acquires his profession by his own labor and his own money, and that consequently his profession is his property. So it is, and no one will dispute the title. He has a right to exert or withhold his medical skill as seems best to him. He has the same right to be the judge of his conduct in his profession that the lawyer, the minister or the journalist has. So has the carpenter—his trade is his property. But when a human being has been buried beneath a mass of rubbish, of all the crowd who gather to the scene of disaster a carpenter is the only one who, from the skill he has acquired in his trade, can remove the debris quick enough to save the life of the individual, it is not so much a question with him as to the value of his services as an expert, as it is a question of humanity. He has an absolute right to stand with his hands folded and let his fellow creature suffocate beneath the ruins, unless some friend will step forward and guarantee ample compensation for his services. There is but one power to compel him to use his skill and that is the promptings of humanity. So we think that the court decided properly when according to the physicians the right to reserve their services as experts until they were paid for it, and the resolutions of the medical society only reaffirmed an unquestionable fact. In this particular instance the value of the testimony of the physicians to the prisoner in a case wherein his life is at stake, is not a matter for public criticism; The only question before the court was as to the legal power to compel the testimony to be given; its value, if given gratuitously, was to be determined by the doctors themselves, and the assumption is that their conduct was regulated by their own convictions as to what was humane in the premises.