The subjects of crime and insanity have often been discussed under a common title. In the law courts the plea of insanity is often raised in defense of the criminal. A review of the treatment of maniacs in past times, and criminals at the present time, shows many curious analogies. For these several reasons let us briefly examine the attitude of society toward these unfortunates who are animated in their behavior by the possibly related conditions—insanity and crime.
Insanity was formerly looked upon as evidence of demoniacal possession. The idea that a disordered intellect could be the result of physical disease—of lesions of the brain—was only established after centuries of observation. In the mean while, every torment that misguided man could inflict was frantically suffered by untold thousands of chained and caged victims. Now, thanks to science, a thin section of diseased brain may, by means of the lantern, be projected upon a screen, so that audiences of thousands can realize for themselves the pathological nature of certain forms of insanity.
Dr. Andrew D. "White, in his chapter on Demoniacal Possession and Insanity,[1] says: "If ordinary diseases were likely to be attributed to diabolical agency, how much more diseases of the brain, and especially the more obscure of these! These, indeed, seemed to the vast majority of mankind possible only on the theory of satanic intervention."
It would be difficult to find a more ghastly page of history than is embodied in the two chapters on insanity by Dr. White in his New Chapters in the Warfare of Science. One becomes transfixed with horror at the merciless and ignorant brutality exercised in the treatment of the insane. Patients who required the tenderest care and long-continued sleep were forcibly kept awake for days to drive out the devil that was believed to possess them. Science, long thwarted by the Church, finally wrought a marvelous change in the treatment of these unfortunate creatures, by substituting gentleness, airy rooms, and sunny fields for dungeons, exorcisms, prayers, and blood-curdling cruelties. To one at all familiar with the external aspects of insanity, in its various forms, it seems incredible that its physical nature was not sooner realized.
The writer has had some slight knowledge of insane asylums, not only in America but in Japan, China, and Java, and in all these places, with their different nationalities and consequent facial peculiarities, one could easily recognize melancholia, dementia, and certain other forms of mental disease. The asylum at Buitenzorg, in Java, was of special interest, for here one
- ↑ Popular Science Monthly, vol. xxxiv, p. 434.
