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

  • Pagan, J. M. (John MacMichan), 1802-1868.
Date:
1840
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

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

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    PREFACE. The following work, which contains the substance of lec- tures on the Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity, delivered to his students for a number of years past, in his general course of Forensic Medicine, the Author submits to the profession with considerable diffidence. He has been en- couraged to its publication by the repeated request of his students to do so, and by the fact that there is no English work sufficiently comprehensive upon the subject to which the student can refer. If it shall be found to possess no other merit than that of having collected the details of a number of interesting cases, scattered over many volumes, his labour will not have been entirely thrown away. The Author has sought for his authorities and illustra- tions almost exclusively in the records of medicine, and has availed himself but little of those of the law. To a knowledge of the latter science, he makes no pretension whatever; and if he has hazarded an opinion, that the de- cisions of courts, with regard to some of the forms of in- sanity, rest upon fallacious principles, he is persuaded that the natural remedy for this is the prevalence of correct views upon the subject in the medical profession. But whether this expectation be well founded or not, the