The legal doctrine of responsibility in cases of insanity, connected with alleged criminal acts / by Forbes Winslow.

  • Winslow, Lyttleton Forbes, 1844-1913.
Date:
1858
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The legal doctrine of responsibility in cases of insanity, connected with alleged criminal acts / by Forbes Winslow. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    CASES OF INSANITY. I will, without any prefatory remarks, and with great sub- mission to those whom I have the honour to address, endeavour to direct the attention of the Society to the following salient and relevant questions connected with the important subject selected for discussion. I will consider seriatim :— 1st. The nature of Insanity in its medico-legal relations. 2nd. The legal doctrine of responsibility in connection with Insanity associated with alleged criminal acts. 3rd. The doc-trine of partial Insanity or Monomania. 4th. The existence of Homicidal Insanity and insane irre- sistible impulses. 5th. Anomalous or mixed cases of mental disorder, involving the question of modified responsibility and the propriety of punishment. There is no fallacy more generally entertained by those who have had but limited opportunities of studying or becoming practically acquainted with the phenomena of insanity, than that, in the great majority of cases, the disease consists, in its elemen- tary and essential features, in a disorder of the intellectual, as contra-distinguished from a derangement of the moral faculties of the mind; that the intellect is in a condition of aberration ; that the ideas are perverted; that the senses convey illusory images to the sensorium; that the perceptions are false, the mind being invariably under the dominion of some creation of the distempered fancy; in other words, that delusions or hallu- a 2