On the scientific value of the legal tests of insanity : a paper read before the Metropolitan Counties Branch of the British Medical Association / by J. Russell Reynolds.

  • Reynolds, J. Russell (John Russell), Sir, 1828-1896.
Date:
1872
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the scientific value of the legal tests of insanity : a paper read before the Metropolitan Counties Branch of the British Medical Association / by J. Russell Reynolds. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    judges, but in spite of scientific protest that such prisoners are insane—and we see the sentences subse- quently revoked, by appeal to the Home Secretary, who acts upon the advice of scientific referees, and of the judge who presided on the trial; the former often simply repeating what had been urged in the evidence for the defence; the latter agreeing in the judgment which he was bound, legally, to oppose. My wish, in bringing this matter under the notice of the Medical Association, is to take the first step towards the holding of a conference, that shall be quite friendly, between some members of the two professions, with the purpose of devising means for bringing the legal criteria of insanity into harmony with the facts of science. In a legal inquiry, the end to be obtained by the lawyer is identical with that which the physician sets before himself, viz., the diagnosis, discrimination, or distinction, in a particular case, of insanity from sanity, and from feigned disease. The object of the two professions, when they thus come in contact, is the same; it is not then to determine what insanity is; nor what are the signs of its presence; but whether the signs, criteria, or tests of its existence applied to the case in question, will, place the indi- vidual in the category of the sane or insane. Each profession has arrived at an understanding among its own members as to what insanity is, and what are the signs of its presence; but, unfortunately, the two do not agree upon either point. The medical profession has engaged itself upon the first of these questions, in its study of the nature or pathology of insanity, in all its forms, phases, and degrees; and it