The medical jurisprudence of insanity / J.M. Pagan.

  • Pagan, J. M. (John MacMichan), 1802-1868.
Date:
1843
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The medical jurisprudence of insanity / J.M. Pagan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

    226/340 (page 216)
    exist: when there is an acknowledged motive for the crime in the mental aberration, limited though it be, or in the exalted imagination or passions of an insane patient, the difficulty is at an end; and the more absurd the delusion, and the more inadequate the motive assigned, the greater reason is there to believe that the criminal act is the con- sequence of insanity. But that the affective faculties only may be unsound, seems obvious from the facts related, and will be more clearly proved from those which I am shortly to adduce. There is nothing incon- sistent with our knowledge of the intellectual nature of man, to prevent us from believing that our moral sense may be diseased independent of intellectual aberra- tion. The will is a part of our intellectual constitution, and it seems as reasonable, a priori, to believe that it should be weakened or depraved, as that our reason should be impaired or alienated. No man could have forseen, without the facts which prove it, that man could be- come insane at all—that having once enjoyed the blessings of a sound mind, he should be deprived even of the sem- blance of his former intellectual nature, or that he should form erroneous judgments upon the plainest subjects, any more than he could have discovered that the volition should become more obstinate as he advances in years, or that after this extreme obstinacy, in advanced old age, it should become so weakened that he has no preferences— that he desires nothing and repudiates nothing, but permits himself to be guided by any one who chooses to direct his actions. This depravation, therefore, of the will, may as fairly infer the irresponsibility of the patient, as intellectual disease or deficiency. It is not certainly so easy to prove the existence of the one as the other: mental aberration proves itself; depraved volition, if it should lead to crime, may be so like crime as to be almost incapable of being