482
77/6' Green Bag.
of gross misconduct put an end to his acts of violence — enraged with a woman who had called him names, he threw her into a well. He was condemned to seclusion in the Bicôtre." Now the obvious and proper criticism for the legal profession to pass on these observations was that they did not exclude the possibility, nay the probability, that the patients in question were suffering from intellectual as well as moral insanity, and that consequently there was no need to raise this form of mental alienation to the dig nity of a separate and distinct disease. But, instead of this, law yers, juries and lay writers in England banded themselves together into a con federacy whose object was to extinguish Pinel's heresy, as they deemed it, with con tempt and ridicule. The course which they pursued is thus summed up by a writer in the " New York Medico-Legal Journal": "Some times the criticism takes the form of epi gram, e.g. an irresistible criminal impulse is simply a criminal impulse not resisted, or, if moral insanity is a disease, it must be cured upon the scaffold. At other times there is an affectation of logical precision. ' Syllogistically stated,' observes one intellec tual athlete, the position may be stated thus: "' Men of unsound mind are irresponsi ble; men of unsound mind have reason, judgment and memory, л Men having rea son, judgment and memory are irrespon sible.' Another gentleman" (supposed, by the way, to be Francis Jeffrey, the well-
known Scottish lawyer and critic), "breaks out into verse (the quotation which follows is from the ' Craniad ') : "'Nature is sick and crime is her disease, Rogues are indicted, tried, convicted too. And sentenced for what Nature bade them do. 'Tis true they're rogues, but Nature more than they. She made the brain that led the rogues astray, She makes men lie, and cheat, and steal, and kill. She gets the better of their better will. Soon shall the glorious blissful age arrive. When man with Nature shall no longer strive, When thieves and murderers shall be known to be Afflicted with a sad calamity.'"
Judges of Lord Bramwell's school took a similar line on the bench. " Your lordship," said a de fending counsel, on one occasion, to this stern, and yet, accord ing to his lights, em inently fair and just judge, " has heard of the disease klepto mania." " I am here to cure it," was the reply. And nothing was more common, half a century ago, than to hear pccuP1NEL. pants of the English bench, whose gentle spirits were incapable of such grim ut terances, declare to juries that if the plea of moral insanity were accepted, all that a man had to do was to nurse a criminal impulse till it became irresistible and then yield to it with impunity. Badinage and criticism of this kind pro duced their natural results. Instead of modi fying their statements, as wider inductions would have led them to do, the French alien ists and their American disciples clung to the theory of moral insanity in its original and exaggerated form with all the unswerv ing fidelity of a persecuted sect. Thus Es quirol, Pinel's pupil, who uttered the noble
