RECENTLY, a friend asked me several questions regarding medico-legal matters, and believing that my replies may be of some slight interest to others, I will give them to you; not as an authoritative treatise, but merely as an argument for the betterment of the conditions mentioned. The questions asked me may be readily inferred from the trend of the answers. I quote some of these questions in part. I do not “consider that medico-legal testimony, in the average to-day, tends to a fair adjustment of the issues at stake.” I say this because, if a shrewd, unscrupulous attorney employs an equally unscrupulous corps of medical expert witnesses, to swear to what he wants them to, practically every case in court and every suit tried, can be swung his way. From my own personal observation, I have found that it is decidedly unusual for any corporation or other supposedly wealthy defendant, to secure honest justice in cases in which personal injury is claimed or alleged by the plaintiff. I have repeatedly seen judgments for large sums of money awarded plaintiffs in suits against large corporations, for alleged injuries which never occurred to the extent claimed (and testified to by expert witnesses), or never occurred at all, and I am sure that every physician in any large city knows of similar occurrences. “Some of the evils observed?” … “Pertaining to the Doctor's testifying.” The attorneys, particularly those who handle personal injury cases, very frequently employ a group of so-called expert witnesses, who make a business of appearing on the witness stand in this kind of litigation. Some of these are willing to, and do, qualify as experts in practically every medical specialty. It is a fact that in one instance of my own observation, a man appeared, qualified and testified as an expert psychiatrist in one court, as a surgeon in another, as an expert in roentgen diagnosis in another, and as an expert in pediatrics in a fourth court, all during one afternoon, and on the same floor in the Cook County Court House. I do know it for the truth, but I was very creditably informed that this same man, a licensed physician, qualified and testified as an expert in pathology the next morning. Of course, this man—and far too many others—will testify exactly as whoever employs him desires, and as the lawyer in the case wants it done. Another evil, which we as roentgenologists are subjected to and have to complain about, is the calling or subpcenaing of physicians as ordinary witnesses, and, after their appearance upon the witness stand, qualifying them as experts and requiring them to give expert testimony, even to the point of requiring answers to hypothetical questions.