The fusion of medicine and law for in extremis health and medical decisions: does it produce energy and light or just cosmic debris?

The physician is still the wonder-worker, the soothsayer, to whose reading of the entrails we resort when hard beset. We may scoff at him in health, but we send for him in pain. The judge, if you fall into his clutches, is still the Themis of the Greeks, announcing mystic dooms. You may not understand his words, but their effects you can be made to feel. Each of us is thus a man of mystery to the other, a power to be propitiated in proportion to the element within it that is mystic o r unknown. . . . More and more we lawyers are awaking to a perception of the truth that what divides and distracts us in the solution of a legal problem is not so much uncertainty about the law as uncertainty about the facts-the facts which generate the law. Let the facts be known as they are, and the law will sprout from the seed and turn its branches toward the light. Wc make our blunders from time to time as rumor has it that you make your own. The worst of them would have been escaped if the facts had been disclosed to us before the ruling was declared (Benjamin N. Cardozo, What Medicine Can Dojbr Law).'