Practical observations on insanity : in which some suggestions are offered towards an improved mode of treating diseases of the mind, and some rules proposed which it is hoped may lead to a more humane and successful method of cure: to which are subjoined, remarks on medical jurisprudence, as it relates to diseased intellect / by Joseph Mason Cox, M.D.

  • Joseph Mason Cox
Date:
1813
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Practical observations on insanity : in which some suggestions are offered towards an improved mode of treating diseases of the mind, and some rules proposed which it is hoped may lead to a more humane and successful method of cure: to which are subjoined, remarks on medical jurisprudence, as it relates to diseased intellect / by Joseph Mason Cox, M.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    form a class the most hopeless^ and are often found to be incurable. great influence in all diseases of the brain, especially in this kind of dementia: such persons commonly on the full and change of the moon, especially about the equinoxes and summer solstice, are usually in the height of their dis- temper, and therefore crimes committed by them in such their distempers are under the same judgment as those whereof we have before spoken, namely according to the measure or degree of their distemper; the person that is absolutely mad for a day, killing a man in that distemper, is equally not guilty, as if he were mad without intermission. But such persons as have their lucid intervals (which ordi- narily happens between the full and change of the moon)t in such intervals have usually, at least, a competent use of reason, and crimes committed by them in these intervals are of the same nature, and subject to the same punishment as they if they had no such deficiency ; nay, the alienations and contracts made by them in such intervals are obliging to [obligatory on] their heirs and executors. Again this accidental dementia, whether temporal^ or marked as singular, that the term lunaticus,'^ which, though derived from a vulgar error, gives little to the modern proceeding by commission [of lunacy] and is the only specific description of afflicted persons contained in it, is not to be found in any form of the old writ, (Reg. Brev. 266,) nor in the statute. (De Prerogativa Regis, 17. Ed. 2,0. 9.10.) ib. 450.