A letter to the Right Honourable Lord Binning, M.P. &c. &c. &c : containing some remarks on the state of lunatic asylums, and on the number and condition of the insane poor in Scotland / by Andrew Halliday.

  • Halliday, Andrew, Sir, 1781-1839.
Date:
1816
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A letter to the Right Honourable Lord Binning, M.P. &c. &c. &c : containing some remarks on the state of lunatic asylums, and on the number and condition of the insane poor in Scotland / by Andrew Halliday. 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.

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    and the charge of it given to those friends, as the magistrate does not feel himself bound to take any further cognizance of the matter. With regard to criminal Lunatics, the law of Scotland is very defective, for if a madman com- mits a crime, he is sent to a jail as a common delinquent, until brought to trial in the regular course of law. If the counsel at his trial plead insanity, and prove it, he of course is not amen- able for the crime for which he was put in con- finement; but unless his friends can find suffi- cient security for his future good behaviour, he is remanded to prison, there to be kept in safe custody until such security is found, and, as Sir William Rae has so justly remarked, the allowing of such to remain at large with their friends, under any circumstances, has often had effect on them in the commission of crimes. There was lately in the jail of Stirling, a person confined by his relatives as a furious maniac, who was allowed to remain chained to a stone for years, without body-clothes or covering of any kind ; and so remiss were these relatives in their atten- tions to him, that his ceU often continued for many months at a time without being cleaned. A madman has remained in the tolbooth of Edinburgh, for the last twenty years; and in 1813, Ann Simpson had been twenty-one years in the jail of Banff, where she bore a child, the