it for us, but I prefer to convey my idea of it in the simplest manner. Insanity is a disease of the body, and I doubt not of the brain. The world is astonished to find it so. They thought for almost six thousand years that it was an affection of the mind only. Is it strange that the discovery should have been made so late? You know that it is easier to move a burden upon two smooth rails on a level surface, than over the rugged ground. It has taken almost six thousand years to learn that. But moralists argue that insanity shall not be admitted as a physical disease, because it would tend to exempt the sufferer from responsibility, and because it would expose society to danger. But who shall know, better than the Almighty, the ways of human safety, and the bounds of human responsibility? And is it strange that the brain should be diseased? What organ, member, bone, muscle, sinew, vessel or nerve is not subject to disease? What is physical man, but a frail, perishing body, that begins to decay as soon as it begins to exist? What is there of animal existence here on earth exempt from disease and decay? Nothing. The world is full of disease, and that is the great agent of change, renovation and health. And what wrong or error can there be in supposing that the mind may be so affected by disease of the body as to relieve man from responsibility? You will answer, it would not be safe. But who has assured you of safety? Is not the way of life through dangers lurking on every side, and though you escape ten thousand perils, must you not fall at last? Human life is not safe, nor intended to be safe, against the elements. Neither is it safe, nor intended to be safe, against the moral elements of man's nature. It is not safe against pestilence, nor against war, against the thunderbolts of heaven, nor against the blow of the maniac. But comparative safety can be secured, if you will be wise. You can guard against war, if you will cultivate peace. You can guard against the lightning, if you will learn the laws of electricity, and raise the protecting rod. You will be safe against the maniac, if will watch the causes of madness, and remove them. you after all, there will be danger enough from all these causes to remind you that on earth you are not immortal. Yet Although my definition would not perhaps be strictly accurate, I should pronounce insanity to be a derangement of the minama. character and conduct, resulting from bodily disease. I take this 66 word derangement, because it is one in common every day use. We all understand what is meant when it is said that anything is ranged or arranged. The houses on a street are ranged, if built upon a straight line. The fences on your farms are ranged. A single object too may be ranged. A tower, if justly built, is ranged; that is, it is ranged by the plummet. It rises in a perpendicular range from the earth. A file of men marching in a straight line are in range. Range yourselves, men," though not exactly artistical, is not an uncommon word of command. Now what do we mean when we use the word " deranged?" Manifestly that a thing is not ranged, is not arranged, is out of range. If the houses on the street be built irregularly, they are deranged. If the walls be inclined to the right or left, they are deranged. If there be an unequal pressure on either side, the tower will lean, that is, it will be deranged. If the file of men become irregular, the line will be deranged. So if a man is insane. There was a regular line which he was pursuing; not the same line which you or I follow, for all men pursue different lines, and every sane man has his own peculiar path. All these paths are straight, and all are ranged, though all divergent. It is easy enough to discover when the street, the wall, the tower, or the martial procession is deranged. But it is quite another thing to determine when the course of an individual life has become deranged. We deal not then with geometrical or material lines, but with an imaginary line. We have no physical objects for landmarks. We trace the line backward by the light of imperfect and unsatisfactory evidence, which leaves it a matter almost of speculation whether there has been a departure or not. In some cases, indeed the task is easy. If the fond mother becomes the murderer of her offspring, it is easy to see that she is deranged. If the pious man, whose steps were firm and whose pathway led straight to heaven, sinks without temptation into criminal debasement, it is easy to see that he is deranged. But in cases where no natural instinct or elevated principle throws its light upon our research, it is often the most difficult and delicate of all human investigations to determine when a person is deranged. We have two tests. First, to compare the individual after the supposed derangement with himself as he was before. Second, to compare his course with those ordinary lines of human life which we expect sane persons, of equal intelligence, and similarly situated, to pursue. If derangement, which is insanity, mean only what we have assumed, how absurd is it to be looking to detect whether memory, hope, joy, fear, hunger, thirst, reason, understanding, wit, and other faculties, remain? So long as life lasts, they never cease to abide with man, whether he pursue his straight and natural way, or the crooked and unnatural course of the lunatic. If he be diseased, his faculties will not cease to act. They will only act differently. It is contended here that the prisoner is not deranged because he performed his daily task in the State Prison, and his occasional labor afterward; because he grinds his knives, fits his weapons, and handles the file, the axe and the saw, as he was instructed, and as he was wont to do. Now, the Lunatic Asylum at Utica has not an idle person in it, except the victims of absolute and incurable dementia, the last and worst stage of all insanity. Lunatics are almost the busiest people in the world. They have their prototypes only in children. One lunatic will make a garden, another drive the plough, another gather flowers. One writes poetry, another essays, another orations. In short, lunatics eat, drink, sleep, work, fear, love, hate, laugh, weep, mourn, die. They do all things that sane men do, but do them in some peculiar way. It is said, however, that this prisoner has hatred and anger, that he has remembered his wrongs, and nursed and cherished revenge; wherefore, he cannot be insane. Cowper, a moralist who had tasted the bitter cup of insanity, reasoned otherwise : "But violence can never longer sleep Than human passions please. In ev'ry heart Melancholy springs oftenest from recalling and brooding over wrong and suffering. Melancholy is the first stage of madness, and it is only recently that the less accurate name of monomania has been substituted in the place of melancholy. Melancholy is the foster-mother of anger and revenge. Until 1830, our statutory definition of lunatics was in the terms "disorderly persons who, if left at large, might endanger the lives of others." Our laws now regard them as merely disorderly and dangerous, and society acquiesces, unless madness rise so high, that the madman slays his imaginary enemy, and then he is pronounced sane. The prisoner lived with Nathaniel Lynch, at the age of eight or nine, and labored occasionally for him during the last winter. Lynch visited him in the jail, and asked him if he remembered him, and remembered living with him. The prisoner answered, Yes. Lynch asked the prisoner whether he was whipped while there, and by whom, and why. From his answers, it appeared that he had been whipped by his mistress for playing truant, and that he climbed a rough board fence in his night-clothes and fled to his mother. Upon this evidence, the learned professor from Geneva College, Dr. SPENCER, builds an argument that the prisoner has conception, sensation, memory, imagination, and association, and is most competent for the scaffold. Now, here are some verses to which I would invite the doctor's attention: "Shut up in dreary gloom, like convicts are, In company of murderers! Oh, wretched fate! If pity e'er extended through the franie, Or sympathy's sweet cordial touched the heart, Absorbed in sorrow, where darkness, poverty, and every curse impart." Here is evidence not merely of memory and other faculties, but of what we call genius. Yet these verses are a sad effusion of Thomas Lloyd, a man-slaying maniac in Bedlam. The first question of fact here, gentlemen, as in every case where insanity is gravely insisted upon, is this: IS THE PRISONER FEIGNING OR COUNTERFEITING INSANITY? What kind of man is he? A youth of twenty-three, without learning, education, or experience. Dr. SPENCER raises him just above the brute; Dr. BIGELOW exalts him no higher; and Dr. DIMON thinks that he has intellectual capacity not exceeding that of a child of ten years, with the knowledge of one of two or three. These are the people's witnesses. All the witnesses concur in these estimates of his mind. Can you conceive of such a creature comprehending such a plot, and standing up in his cell in the jail, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, and month after month, carrying on such a fraud; and all the while pouring freely into the ears of inquisitors curious, inquisitors friendly, and inquisitors hostile, without discrimination or alarm, or apparent hesitation or suspicion, with "child-like simplicity," as our witnesses describe it, and with "entire docility," as it is described by the witnesses for the people, confessions of crime which, if they fail to be received as evidences of insanity, must constitute an insurmountable barrier to his acquittal? I am ashamed for men who, without evidence of the prisoner's dissimulation, and in opposition to the unanimous testimony of all the witnesses, that he is sincere, still think that this poor fool may deceive them. If he could feign, and were feigning, would he not want some counsel, some friend, if not to advise and assist, at least to inform him of the probable success of the fraud? And yet no one of his counsel or witnesses has ever conversed with him, but in a crowd of adverse witnesses; and for myself, I have not spoken with him in almost two months, and during the same period have never looked upon him elsewhere than here, in the presence of the Court and of the multitude. Would a sane man hold nothing back? admit everything? to every body? affect no ignorance? no forgetfulness? no bewilderment? no confusion? no excitement? no delirium? Dr. RAY, in his Treatise on the Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity, (p. 333) gives us very different ideas from all this, of those who can feign, and of the manner of counterfeiting: "A person who has not made the insane a subject of study, cannot simulate madness, so as to deceive a physician well acquainted with the disease. Mr. HAASLAM declares that to sustain the character of a paroxysm of active insanity, would require a continuity of exertion beyond the power of a sane person.' Dr. CONOLLY affirms that he can hardly imagine a case which would be proof against an efficient system of observation. "The grand fault committed by impostors is, that they overdo the character they assume. "The really mad, except in the acute stage of the disease, are, generally speaking, not readily recognized as such by a stranger, and they retain so much of the rational as to require an effort to detect the impairment of their faculties. 66 Generally speaking, after the acute stage has passed off, a maniac has no difficulty in remembering his friends and acquaintances, the places he has been accustomed to frequent, names, dates, and events, and the occurrences of his life. The ordinary relations of things are, with some exceptions, as easily and clearly perceived as ever, and his discrimination of character seems to be marked by his usual shrewdness. * * * A person simulating mania will frequently deny all knowledge of men and things with whom he has always been familiar.” And now, gentlemen, I will give you a proof of the difference between this real science and the empiricism upon which the counsel for the people rely, in this cause. JEAN PIERRE was brought before the Court of Assizes in Paris, in 1824, accused of forgery, swindling, and incendiarism. He feigned insanity. A commission of eminent physicians examined him, and detected his imposture by his pretended forgetfulness, and confusion in answering interrogatories concerning his life and history. The most prominent of these questions are set down in the books.—Ray, p. 338.) VOL. 1-28. |
