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.

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    who in his official capacity as surgeon to the General Prison of Scotland had observed thousands of prisoners, declared that he had not known one to exhibit any aesthetic talent; he had never seen a pen-sketch, a clever poem, or an ingenious contrivance produced by one of them.* Habitual criminals are, he says, without moral sense—are true moral imbeciles; their moral insensibility is such tbat in the presence of temptation they have no self-control against crime; and among all the murderers he had known, amounting to nearly five hundred, only three could be ascertained to have expressed any remorse. He quotes among other testimonies to a like effect the opinion of a medical friend, a shrewd observer of men, much conversant with lunacy, and having had a long ex- perience among prisoners, who declared himself mainly impressed with their extreme deficiency or perversion of moral feeling, the strength of the evil propensities of their natures and their utter impracticability. In all my ex- perience I have never seen such an accumulation of morbid appearances as I witness in the post mortem examinations of the prisoners who die here. Scarcely one of them can be said to die of one disease, for almost every organ of the body is more or less diseased; and the wonder to me is that life could have been supported in such a diseased frame. Their moral nature seems equally diseased with their physical frame; and whilst their mode of life in prison reanimates their physical health I doubt whether their minds are equally benefited, if * In this, however, his experience must have been singular • for other prison officers haVe observed these deficiencies. ^ '