Volume 1

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.

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    invalidate contracts generally, and defeat a will which is the direct offspring of this partial insanity.”(g) The converse of this result, depending, however, on the same principle, is illustrated by a case decided by Judge King, in Philadelphia, in 1851. “ A monomaniacal delusion,” he said, “ inveterately entertained by a testator against one who would otherwise have been the natural object of his bounty, and shown to be the reason which has excluded him from it, and to have had no other existence except the distempered imagi¬ nation of the testator, would invalidate a will made under such influence. And for the very plain reason that a will made under the suggestion of such an insane delusion, is not what the law requires a will to be, the product of a mind capable of reasoning rightly. Por although the law recognizes the difference between general and partial insanity, yet if the will has been made under the influence of such partial insanity, and as the product of it, it is as invalid as if made under the effects of an insanity never so general. Eccentricities of con¬ duct, absurd opinions, or belief in things appearing to us extravagant, although they may be and are evidences of tes¬ tamentary incapacity, do not constitute it necessarily and in themselves. A man may believe in witches and witchcraft, as it seems this testator did, or, like him, he may have believed his health to have been permanently affected by slow poisons surreptitiously administered to him, and yet be competent to make a will, where such will is not shown to have some con¬ nection with such absurd opinions or extravagant belief, and where the mind is shown to be in other respects sound and vigorous, and the judgment intelligent and clear. This tes¬ tator was upwards of eighty-three years old when he died, and consequently received his early impressions when the belief in witches and witchcraft still lingered among persons of a much higher social position and of much better educa¬ tion than himself. Colonial America either inherited from the mother country, or received from the emigration of con¬ tinental Europe, this absurd notion. Pennsylvania did not so far escape the general contagion as to make it very surprising (g) See also Crum v. Thornly, 47 Ill. 192.
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