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.

    262/356 (page 226)
    The right problem for a court of justice to place before a scientific witness is to trace a connection not between the delusion and the act, which may be undetectable— or, if detectable, such as would not excuse the act if the delusion were true—but between the disease and the act. Certainly, it is an extraordinary demand to make, that when two symptoms of disease exist, the delusion and the criminal act, the one should be proved to be the cause of the other; that the effects of a common cause should be proved to be cause and effect. Out of the depths of deranged feeling in which the delusion is rooted there may spring up at any moment insane impulses, which are quite independent of it, but which, like it, are born of the disease. Thus much, then, with regard to the cases of homicidal insanity in which there is a distinct delusion and the homicide has or has not an evident connection with it. In the next chapter I shall say something specially of homicide in connection with epilepsy.