Medico-legal treatise on homicide by external violence.

  • Watson, Alexander, 1799-1879.
Date:
1842
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medico-legal treatise on homicide by external violence. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    and had conversations with him of considerable length. In all these interviews with him, Dr Spens could discover no indica- tion of insanity, no hallucination, nor disorder of intellect. I visited him twice, and formed a similar opinion of him ; but I considered him a man of low or weak intellect, and to be pos- sessed of a great degree of cunning. When I saw him he de- nied all knowledge of the murder, which circumstance I con- ceived at the time to be a strong proof of sanity, and of his knowledge of the heinous nature of this crime in particular, if he really was the person who had perpetrated it. He after- wards underwent several judicial examinations before the Sheriff- substitute and Procurator-fiscal, who stated, that his conduct when before them was composed and perfectly rational. Dr Alison, Dr Mackintosh, and Dr Scott, as well as Dr Spens and I, heard the evidence at the trial, so far as regarded the conduct of Howison both before and after the murder, as also regarding his state of mind for some time previously. A woman from the Canongate, with whom Howison had lodged, had known him for a considerable length of time, for he had lodged with her six years previously. He then left her to go to England, where he had remained till within the last two months; and on his return to Edinburgh he was so much changed in his appearance and in his circumstances, that she did not at first know him. He had formerly been a hawker of small wares, was clean in his person, and like other people; now he was a beggar, dirty in his appearance, and peculiar in his mind. He said he had a fever in England, of which no correct account could be obtained. She detailed several pecu- liarities which she had observed in Howison while her lodger. The chief of these were a voracious appetite,—a practice of pricking his arms with pins or needles, to get blood from them, which he thought did good to a painful affection of his head,— he sprinkled salt on his bed to keep away fleas,'1—and when he carried salt about his person and upon his head, which he said was to keep away the witches it is probable he had a similar object in view, which he did not choose to avow ; for he seems to have had faith in the power of salt to destroy vermin/ but was never known to have given any other indication of be-