Dr. Guy on insanity & crime, and on the plea of insanity in criminal cases.

  • William Augustus Guy
Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Dr. Guy on insanity & crime, and on the plea of insanity in criminal cases. 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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    Male Convicts.—The 5,952 male convicts of March, 1862, con- sisted of 217 military offenders, and 5,735 civilians. The two classes are thrown together in the tables of the essay cited at p. 163, and in the earlier part of this paper. I shall now separate the military offenders as having been guilty of crimes not strictly comparable with those committed by the other convicts. But, in doing so, I shall take occasion to compare the bodily and mental condition of the two classes. Table VI. Civilians. Military. Ditto per 1,000. Civilians. Military. 1. Weak-minded, insane, and epileptic .... 2. Subjects of scrofula and chronic disease 3. Subject to deformity or defect, 1 original or acquired J 4. Not suffering from disease, infirmity,! or defect J 235 657 1,4! 4 3,399 8 7 20 182 41 115 251 593 37 32 92 839 The figures of this table are very instructive. They show that the process of recruiting which transforms the civilian into a soldier, while it eliminates a large proportion of the subjects of bodily disease and defect, does not shut out any appreciable propor- tion of those who suffer from disorders of the mind and nervous system: and this instructive fact will appear in a still clearer light if we resolve the figures of the first line of the table into their con- stituent parts, as is done in Table VII. Table VII. Ditto per 1,000. Civil. Military. Civil. Military. 1. Weak-minded 160 6 28 28 2. Insane 14 1 2 5 3. Epileptic 61 1 16 5 Thus, then, it appears that the 217 military offenders and the 5,735 civilians contributed to the convict population of 1862 pre- cisely the same proportion of men of weak mind. And we may infer from this that there are to be found among the population which supplies us both with criminals and soldiers about 28 in the thousand of men of weak mind not yet recognised as proper objects for the lunatic asylum. Some of these men, characterised in the picturesque language of the medicant-thief community as half-sharps, are, to my knowledge, very hard to understand. They are a puzzle VOL. XXXII. PART II. N
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