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.

    93/356 (page 57)
    --««r.' CRIME AND INSANITY. 57 act with greater effect upon an unstable mental organisa- tion ; all these causes of disturbance meeting with a powerful co-operating cause in the constitutional predis- position. Moreover, the difficulties of education are greater in such a case. The natural impulses of the temperament manifest themselves early in life, requiring an attention and discipline which few persons are qualified to give, and which are not suitably applied in the routine of an ordinary education; the consequence being that during the important period of growth, when much may be done by proper training to determine the formation of character, the natural bias gains strength through indif- ference and inattention, or by a meddlesome interference is too violently checked. In the foregoing remarks I have spoken generally of the insane temperament, but there are really varieties of it, a description of which would properly find its place in a treatise on insanity. All our present concern is to recognise distinctly that there is such a temperament, which, though by no means abolishing an individual's responsibility, must be taken into account when deeds of violence are done which seem to mark the outbreak of actual mental derangement. Unwarrantable as it may appear, to assume a crime to be evidence of insanity, when there have not been any previous symptoms to indicate disease, it is still possible that the crime may mark the period when an insane tendency has passed into actual insanity—when the weak organ has given way under the strain put upon it. There is one occasional consequence of descent from