[1]in harmony with the teachings of science. For many years, by all authorities on insanity, in season and out of season, the truth has been in vain proclaimed: many times have futile attempts been made to arouse attention to the iniquity of the law as laid down by the judges; but it is still necessary for us to go on protesting, as our forefathers did, and as our children's children may have to do. We may, at any rate, take leave to characterize the administration of the law on every occasion in the plain terms which it deserves. Under the name of justice, grievous injustice has sometimes been done, and it would be easy to point to more than one instance in which murder has been avenged by the judicial murder of an insane and irresponsible person. The saddest and most humiliating disease with which mankind is afflicted, and which should rightly make the sufferer an object of the deepest compassion, only avails in England in the nineteenth century to bring him, in the event of his doing violence, to the edge of the scaffold or over it. To this point have eighteen hundred and seventy-two years of Christianity brought us! And Science protests in vain! Without laying claim to much gift of prophecy, one may, perhaps, venture to predict that the time will come when the inhabitants of the earth will look back upon us with astonishment and horror, not otherwise than as we now look back upon the execution of old women for witchcraft in past times—a barbarity which the judges were the last to be willing to abandon, which they clung to long after it had been condemned by enlightened opinion. Indeed, there has not been, as Mr. Bright once said in the House of Commons, a single modification of the law in the direction of mercy and justice which has not been opposed by the judges!
The ground which medical men should firmly and consistently take in regard to insanity is, that it is a physical disease; that they alone are competent to decide upon its presence or absence; and that it is quite as absurd for lawyers or the general public to give their opinion on the subject in a doubtful case, as it would be for them to do so in a case of fever. For what can they know of its predisposing and exciting
- ↑ tion of the law is punishment, and, if its severity is mitigated, it is not by the law, but by the suspension of the law, by authority above the law. The Law is thus entirely antagonistic to Medicine on all those questions of mental science which involve the freedom and well-being of the imbecile and the insane, and which often determine whether they shall be put to an ignominious death or not, whether they shall be deprived of their property or suffered to retain it. This antagonism is, therefore, a most serious matter to the insane, their friends and families, not less serious to judges and legislators, and of the deepest interest to both medical and legal professions. For with such opinions inculcated by the law, existing ignorances are more deeply rooted in the public mind, so that the difficulty in treating the insane by medical men, and in giving testimony in courts, is greatly increased, especially when great judges remark (influenced, no doubt, by the degrading exhibition of opposing bitterness of medical men in courts), that the introduction of medical opinions and theories on this subject has proceeded from the vicious principle of considering insanity a disease, whereas it is a fact to be ascertained by evidence, in like manner as any other fact, and no more is necessary than to try the question by proof of the habits, the demeanor, conversation, and acts of the alleged lunatic."
