The Case of the Calendar Girl

Foreword

I consider my friend, Dr. Hubert Winston Smith, one of the outstanding figures in the field of legal medicine, just as I consider legal medicine far more important than it is generally considered in the public mind.

Dr. Hubert Winston Smith is not only a doctor of medicine but an attorney at law as well. He is, moreover, a trial attorney of unusual ability.

Some years ago he was appointed special counsel to represent a veteran of World War II who had been convicted of homicide on circumstantial evidence and sentenced to the electric chair. Dr. Smith was able to bring out a mass of new evidence and present this evidence so convincingly that the conviction was reversed by the Louisiana Supreme Court.

Not only is Dr. Smith a professor of law, a teacher of evidence and of legal medicine at the Law School of the University of Texas, but he is also Professor of Legal Medicine in the Medical School of that University, and is Director of the Law Science Institute. In fact, it would take more space than is presently available simply to list Dr. Smith’s honors and academic distinctions.

It is under his guidance that legal medicine classes for doctors and trial lawyers are being held throughout the country. In these classes, members of both the medical and legal professions are given an opportunity to study the highly technical field of medical evidence as applied to law.

But what interests me most of all about Dr. Smith is his philosophical outlook on life. This trained scientist feels that the time has come when man should concentrate on what Dr. Smith refers to as “psychic income” rather than income on a dollars-and-cents basis.

Recently I had occasion to visit a young man who was confined in jail on a charge that was almost certain to result in a prison sentence. This young man was making a good-faith effort to analyze the reasons which had caused him to become a criminal. At length, he said, “I wish that while I was getting my education someone had pointed out to me a little more clearly the basic difference between right and wrong.” This was a simple statement, yet when we analyze it, it has far-reaching repercussions. It was a statement that came from a young man whose life had been blasted because he hadn’t stopped to think of the basic difference between right and wrong.

Dr. Hubert Winston Smith is a man at the other end of the human spectrum. He is as highly educated as any man can expect to be. He is a master of all branches of medicine, including that of psychiatry. He is a shrewd, ingenious, well-trained, capable trial attorney. He is one of the outstanding educators in the field of legal medicine, and his life is devoted to increasing the field of human knowledge.

And Dr. Smith feels that it is time for us as a nation to pay more attention to “psychic income.”

So I dedicate this book to my friend:

HUBERT WINSTON SMITH, A.B., M.B.A., LL.B., M.D.

Erle Stanley Gardner