The “defects of the situation” are just those contradictions, those improbabilities, which occur when one desires to represent the situation as something quite different from what it really is, and this with the very best intentions and the purest belief that one has worked with all of the forethought, craft, and consideration imaginable.

Not only must the self-made victim be exposed, but innocent people who may be suspected must be protected.

We must gather wisdom while we are not required to use it; when the time for use arrives, the time for harvest is over.

Criminal Psychology

A thousand mistakes of every description would be avoided if people did not base their conclusions upon premises furnished by others, take as established fact what is only possibility, or as a constantly recurring incident what has only been observed once.

The problem is not teaching the inferrer to think: the problem is the examination of how inferences have been made by another and what value his inferences may have for our own conclusions

So long as one only looks on the scene, it is impossible, whatever the care, time, and attention bestowed, to detect all the details, and especially note the incongruities: but these strike us at once when we set ourselves to describe the picture on paper as exactly and clearly as possible. …

Criminal Psychology.A Manual for Judges, Practitioners and Students.For the community at large, it is important to recognize that criminal science is a larger thing than criminal law. The legal profession in particular has a duty to familiarize itself with the principles of that science, as the sole means for intelligent and systematic improvement of the criminal law.Two centuries ago, while modern medical science was still young, medical practitioners proceeded upon two general assumptions: one as to the cause of disease, the other as to its treatment. As to the cause of disease,-disease was sent by the inscrutable will of God. No man could fathom that will, nor its arbitrary operation. As to the treatment of disease, there were believed to be a few remedial agents of universal efficacy. Calomel and bloodletting, for example, were two of the principal ones. A larger or smaller dose of calomel, a greater or less quantity of bloodletting, -this blindly indiscriminate mode of treatment was regarded as orthodox for all common varieties of ailment. And so his calomel pill and his bloodletting lances were carried everywhere with him by the doctor.Nowadays, all this is past, in medical science. As to the causes of disease, we know that they are facts of nature,-various, but distinguishable by diagnosis and research, and more or less capable of prevention or control or counter-action. As to the treatment, we now know that there are various specific modes of treatment for specific causes or symptoms, and that the treatment must be adapted to the cause. In short, the individualization of disease, in cause and in treatment, is the dominant truth of modern medical science.

HANS GROSS

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