Criminal lunatics : a letter to the Chairman of the Commissioners in Lunacy / by W. Charles Hood.

  • Hood, W. Charles (William Charles), 1824-1870.
Date:
1860
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Criminal lunatics : a letter to the Chairman of the Commissioners in Lunacy / by W. Charles Hood. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    the greater part of whose lives has been spent in prison, whose moral characters are infamous and debased, and who would gladly sacrifice the life of any officer or attendant, to give a colour to that pretended insanity which has been too successfully assumed. The following will suffice to show the necessity for some provision to meet such cases:—J. F., while awaiting transportation, as a convict in Millbank Prison, in the year 1849, murdered one of the warders; on his trial he was acquitted on the ground of insanity, and being ordered to be detained during Her Majesty’s pleasure, was removed to Bethlehem Hospital. His conduct in the hospital has been uniformly bad, and if any of his wishes are opposed, he threatens either attendants or fellow-patients with violence, and has twice nearly murdered those who were placed over him. He sets all his attendants at defiance, and takes the earliest opportunity to induce any fresh inmate to follow his example. He has spent most of his life in prison, and is known to be a worthless and depraved man. Not having shown any symptoms of the mental disease on which ground he obtained his acquittal, repeated applications were made by the authorities of Bethlehem Hospital to the Home Office for his return to prison. These resulted in an order to transfer him to Millbank ; but after remaining there three months, the Governor of the prison obtained a warrant for his return to the hospital, not because he was insane, hut because being neither a prisofier nor convict^ the authorities had no power to detain him in a prison, consequently he continues