95 Ga. 685 | Ga. | 1895
Many reasons may be assigned in support of the principle announced in the second head-note, touching the admission in evidence of text-books by medical and other scientific authors. Those assigned, however, by the text-writers of our own profession against the admission of such works are so satisfactory to our minds, that we approve, without undertaking to elaborate them. The reasons are, first, that experiment and discovery are so constantly changing theories on scientific subjects, that the books of last year may contain something which this year evei’ybody rejects as absurd. . Secondly, the book may be a compilation of a compilation, and be thus hearsay evidence of the most extreme kind. Thirdly, that the authors do not write under oath, and cannot be cross-examined as to the reasons and grounds for their opinion. See Lawson on Expert and Opinion Evidence, p. 170. This latter seems to us a controlling reason against the admission of that class of testimony. In the case of the State v. O’Brien, 7 R. I. 336, upon the trial of a murder case, the court refused to permit Taylor’s Medical Jurisprudence, a text-book of recognized authority, to be read to the jury as evidence, and the Supreme Court of that State, in approval of this ruling of the presiding judge, declared that such works were inadmissible, assigning as a reason that “no evidence in
Let the judgment of the court below be Reversed.