Address to students of medicine at the Scottish Universities / by the Edinburgh Association for Sending Medical Aid to Foreign Countries.

Date:
1842
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Address to students of medicine at the Scottish Universities / by the Edinburgh Association for Sending Medical Aid to Foreign Countries. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    press the narrations of such atrocities, or at least, to make the trial, sentence, and execution of individuals who commit such crimes, as secret-as possible? Above all, does it not become them to seclude strictly from the public view those who have been acquitted of the punishment due for the crime of murder or of treason, on the plea of insanity, in order that such individuals may be dead to the public eye, and that there be nothing- to excite the sympathies or the imi- tative principle in weak minds. Before concluding-, allow me to offer a few remarks on the medi- cal evidence usually given at public trials where the plea of insanity is the point at issue. Nothing- has ever astonished me more than that learned judges, accustomed to sift facts, and to reject from all witnesses their opinions on the facts which they are bound on oath to declare, should, in the case of the medical witnesses, be satisfied with opinions, and thus allow the medical witness to act the part both of judge and jury. I say, I cannot understand how they allow this,—how they allow themselves to be led by the opinion of a man, who, however eminent his standing in his own profession may be, is far from being nearly so capable as the judge, (aye, or even, perhaps, the jurymen themselves,) of forming a sound opinion on the facts which lie may have heal’d from the ordinary witnesses, or from his having seen the prisoner once or twice. Medical men, from the long habit of viewing certain theories as facts, have, generally speaking, most illogically constructed minds, and 1 cannot understand why judge and jury allow the opinions of such men to guide them, as if they themselves could not form a more unbiassed and more just opinion from the facts brought out in evidence. The medical witnesses seem in every case to have forgotten that they are there as witnesses to prove factst not to give opinions; and the questions which ought to be addressed to them ought to be such as will bring out the fact of the prisoner’s state of mind, and the facts, if any such there be, which prove him to be labouring under such permanent and delusive gene- ral fancies as prevent him from being able to distinguish between right and wrong. Had this been done on the late trials, I have no hesita- tion in saying we should have had very different verdicts—verdicts, too, which would have been borne out by the present sane state of the prisoners. It might be useful to inquire what is the fundamental reason that almost all the late writers on insanity regard the presence of any form of insanity as sufficient to exempt a man from responsibility. What- ever the fancied philanthropic feelings which actuate these men, what- ever the casuistry which they employ to engage the feelings of the reader on their side, it appears to me that the true basement on which all originally depends is the belief which these men entertain that in all cases of insanity the brain is in a diseased state. They appear, therefore, to argue that the brain must be organically diseased in mo- nomania also, and that the insanity is but one of the symptoms of the organic disease. They consequently infer that a person suffer- ing from diseased brain must be impelled by a power which he can-