The antagonism of law and medicine in insanity, and its consequences : an introductory lecture / by Thomas Laycock.
- Laycock, Thomas, 1812-1876.
- Date:
- 1862
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The antagonism of law and medicine in insanity, and its consequences : an introductory lecture / by Thomas Laycock. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
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![circumstantial, and therefore liable to all the fallacies to which these kinds of evidence give lise. Still, in the ordinary affairs of life, we infer that if a man is writhing, he suffers pain; or if he tells us lie is perplexed and confused, we can entertain no reasonable doubt of the truth of his statement. In either case, we infer that those vital changes are occurring in his encephalon, which coincide with the feeling of pain or of perplexity and confusion of thought or speech. But the Lord Chancellor does not comprehend the value of such evidence in the detection of mental disorder; so that, when he desired to convince the House of Lords that the plan of receiving the evidence of physicians ought not to be adopted in cases of insanity generally, he said,—“ If there were any process by which, in the case of a lunatic, a man’s skull could be cut into, and the different coats and linings of the brain exposed, so as to exhibit whether they were too much gorged or the circulation impeded, there might be something in the plan. But medical science had not yet attained that pitch of development, and medical men imagined external things to be the indices of things unseen. They there- fore made issues, hardly less important than those of life and death, depend on mere uncertainty.”1 Nothing could be more inconclusive than this argument, except the view which the Lord Chancellor entertains of the evidence by which the scientific and practical questions of medicine are solved. The fact is, that a dyspepsia is determined by the same kind of evidence as an insanity. All morbid changes in the body whatever, considered as ultimate phenomena, are unseen; so that, if we had ascertained the structure of the brain to the minutest fibril, and could lay it bare in the living man in all its details, we should still have to accept “external things as the indices of things unseen.” The subtle forces of life and mind operating in the brain are only to be determined ultimately as they influence consciousness in ourselves, or as they cause those changes in the body or its movements which are the indices of changes in the consciousness of others. We might as well look for the electric or magnetic fluid which carries the expression of our thoughts along the telegraphic wire. In every disease, whether it be a simple inflammation or the most insidious insanity, this is our position. Nor, indeed, is there any other kind of evidence possible, even in the most ordinary cases of this kind. If the police find a man uproarious, reeling about, and smelling of drink, they conclude he has been drinking, and, if they reason at all, will trace the drink from his mouth to his stomach, and from his stomach to his lungs and brains, where it is doing its poisonous work, and rendering him temporarily insane,—thus judging that external things are the indices of things unseen. Let us now examine the results of legal pathology. When the Lord High Chancellor’s bill was discussed in committee in the House of Lords, he said,- - “The humble attempt which he was making had for its object to discover where the abuses and the causes of error lay which rendered such inquiries [as that of Mr Windham] generally odious, and the examination by mad-doctors little better than a farce. The effort was undoubtedly a novelty; but if it were sanctioned by their lordships, it would go far to take out the evil by the roots, and prevent the recurrence of scenes which were a reproach to the courts of this country.”2 Zeal as a radical reformer (not a discoverer) of medical error must be conceded to the learned lord; but it is to be feared that his zeal is too unenlightened and too prejudiced to be effectual for the good ends he aims at. If medicine be right and law wrong, nothing but confusion worse confounded can result from the Lord Chancellor’s efforts to apply legal principles, and regulate the doings of “mad-doctors” in the courts. In Mr Windham’s case the facts are simple enough. Almost as soon as he came of age lie entered upon a career of folly and extravagance. In particular, lie contracted marriage with a woman i Times, 25tli March 1862. * Ibid-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22347616_0010.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
