Volume 3

Wharton and Stille's medical jurisprudence.

  • Francis Wharton
Date:
1873
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Wharton and Stille's medical jurisprudence. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    467/536 (page 1095)
    § 1220. On a less conspicuous theatre than the Tichborne case, though not unlike it in some prominent characteristics, is the following:— human beings of lesions of brain coexisting with great mental acuteness, of defects of memory side by side with great retentiveness, such as physiologists have never recorded among their marvellous tales, of changes, indeed, such as are hardly consistent with continuous identity. We do not even yet reject that hypothesis as a possibility, though we should have done so had we been jurymen, for we do not yet know the limits of the possible, and a speculative thinker is free where a juryman is bound, but there is no other on which the theory of the suit can even as an intellectual argument be sustained. Sir Roger Tichborne, supposing that he appeared in that box and made those answers, must be a man as isolated in his mind as his misfortunes, the sub¬ ject of some unknown mental disease, the victim of some form of aphasia which affects much more than the memory, which spreads over the whole mind, instead of its mechanical instrument the memory, and fearfully injures the entire morale. We need scarcely say this is no more our view than it was that of the jury or the judge, yet it is difficult absolutely to exclude it— impossible not to consider for a moment what the inner Sir Roger—impris¬ oned in that huge form, conscious of an identity he has lost the faculties to prove, conscious of unbearable injustice, yet with the untouched shrewd side of his mind aware that the injustice is not wilful, but is one of the thou¬ sand results of his misfortune—must now be feeling, or, if feeling has been dimmed by some lethargy of spirit, corresponding to the growth of fat upon his body, must be feeling as if he felt. And if we accept the other hypothesis that the man is no member of the Tichborne family, a mere impostor who has gulled the credulous, wasted months of legal time, and sworn not to one but to a thousand perjuries, what a unique figure he remains, how widely different from the one any foreigner would previously have imagined ! The strongest point in his favor is his ex¬ treme unlikeness to the sort of man a clever rogue would have picked out to be agent in such a fraud. He if decently competent would have hunted the world for a great actor, a wicked Garrick, the precise character which is certainly not that of this claimant. He has strong qualities rather than high capacity. That he is a determined man is clear from his whole bearing in the witness-box under the attorney-general’s fire of denunciation and at the time of his arrest; that he is a remorseless one is sufficiently proved by the attack on Mrs. Radcliffe—an attack the wickedness of which does not depend on his identity; and that he is an able one is the first of Sir J. Coleridge’s many points. But what a strange, imperfect, shot-silk kind of ability it must be! Grant for a moment Sir J. Coleridge’s apparent theory of the origin of the affair, that a man named Orton or Castro, bred a butcher, had thought or had been persuaded that if accepted by Lady Tichborne as her son he would without trouble be admitted heir to the family estates, and had gradually conceived a more elaborate scheme, still the fact remains that he must be either the man he claims to be, or have got up his case slowly, piece-