Responsibility in mental disease / by Henry Maudsley.

  • Henry Maudsley
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Responsibility in mental disease / by Henry Maudsley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    125/356 (page 89)
    LORD HADE'S DICTUM. two kinds of insanity only seem to have been recognised by English law—idiocy and lunacy: the idiot who, from his nativity, by a perpetual infirmity is non compos, and the lunatic, who hath sometimes his understanding, and sometimes not, aliquando gaudet lucidis intervallis, and therefore is non compos mentis, so long as he hath not understanding. But as time went on a partial insanity was recognised as distinct from total insanity, although this partial insanity was declared not to absolve a person from responsibility for his criminal acts. There is, says Lord Hale, a partial insanity, and a total in- sanity. The former is either in respect to things, quoad hoc vel Mud insanire. Some persons that have a com- petent use of reason in respect of some subjects, are yet under a particular dementia in respect of some par- ticular discourses, subjects, or applications;—or else it is partial in respect of degrees; and this is the condition of very many, especially melancholy persons, who for the most part discover their defect in excessive fears and griefs, and yet are not wholly destitute of the use of reason; and this partial insanity seems not to excuse them in the committing of any offence for its matter capital; for, doubtless, most persons that are felons of themselves and others are under a degree of partial insanity when they commit these offences. It is very difficult to define the invisible line that divides perfect and partial insanity; but it must rest upon circumstances duly to be weighed by judge and jury, lest, on the one side, there be a kind of inhumanity towards the defects of human nature ; or, on the other