HOW" MAD-DOCTORS " BEG THE QUESTION.
THERE are few professions for which we feel more respect than the Medical profession, or in regard to which we would adopt with more hearty good faith the old maxim, Calque in sad arte credenclum. Only we like to be sure that it is "in their own art," before we accept medical men's opinion with the respect due to technical authority. We don't feel any call to trust them when they go outside their art to talk those vague wiseacre pomposities, concealing complete technical ignorance, which all the world can talk as well as they, and then ask us to attach particular importance to the results arrived at. Now it is our belief that this is exactly what the medical authorities have been doing in relation to the recent Watson and Edmunds' cases, and we can find no better proof of it than two articles, one by Dr. Forbes Winslow, and one editorial, in the Lancet of last week. The Lancet is a paper for which we have a profound respect. We sel- dom leave a number unread, except when it goes so far beyond the range of any but technically educated men that no layman could profit by it. We find its tone always high, its know- ledge varied and full, and its medical psychology often very acute and instructive. But we venture to say that when the Lancet undertdok last week to show that both Mr. Wat- son and Christiana Edmunds were insane, and should have been handed over, as the latter was, to medical treatment in an asylum for criminal lunatics, what its writers were unconsciously attempting to do, and that very unsuccessfully, was to talk in an imposing professional manner,—carrying with it, of course, an authority to which in this case their opinion was not entitled,— on a subject on which they had no less and no more means of coming to any sound conclusion than the public who had read the reports of the trials, and not near so much as the jurymen and judges who had heard the cases tried. It is no wonder that in painful cases of this kind, those who have the best means of forming a sound conclusion should be glad to put off some of
the subject in a maze of words and high-sounding conjectures.
But it is very prejudicial to the effective action of our criminal law that this appeal to a Court of mere confusion should lie at all. If we may judge by the articles of Dr. Forbes Winslow and of
the editorial writer in the Lancet itself, those great medical autho- rities have absolutely no more means of getting at the truth in this matter than we ourselves possess ; but they do come to the discussion with the most fatal prepossessions, from which we believe ourselves to have been quite free,—prepossessions which render their articles utterly worthless as specimens of reasoned judgment, because formed on this very simple type, These people must have been mad, therefore they are."
Now to make good these criticisms let us take the opinions on Mr. Watson's case first. Dr. Forbes Winslow begins by con- demning the medical advice which led Mr. Watson's counsel to treat his case as one of melancholia,' which, we need hardly tell our readers, is a grand word for dejection founded in physical and not mental or moral causes. "Mere melancholia," says the great mecliciner of minds diseased, "has never before been advanced in a court of justice as a valid and scientific plea in favour of a person accused of a capital offence. It would be most dangerous to the best interests of society if such a defence was accepted as an excuse for great crimes. I am speaking of melancholia pure and simple, unassociated with other symptoms of mental disorder." This sounded so impartial that as we read it, we said to ourselves, here we are getting on the trace of true science. Dr. Winslow sees he must have such independent evidence of mental disease as even if Mr. Watson had not committed this murder, would
have still justified his friends in putting him under restraint. Here we have got a doctor who is not content to judge from the fact of murder, and those signs of general depres- sion and excitement which might well both precede and follow its commission, that the man must have been mad who did it.
Dr. Forbes Winslow clearly sees that almost any criminal what- ever might escape the sentence of the law, if an act of unusual and bloody violence, and the variations of spirit likely to accom- pany it, are to be sufficient to prove irresponsibility.' Accord- ingly, we read on in the spirit of disciples, but soon received a rude shock. We discovered that while Dr. Forbes Win- slow seriously condemns the excuse of 'melancholia' (of which there may have been some real evidence) as a justification for acquittal, he would not have had the slightest hesitation in
acquitting Mr. Watson on the plea of conjectural 'paroxysmal madness' (of which, as distinguished from the criminal conduct of which he was accused, 'there was no tittle of evidence what-
ever). We must quote this learned gentleman's exact words (the italics are his own) :—
"I am of opinion that the great mental distress and anxiety to which he [Mr. Watson] was exposed in consequence of his loss of situation, income, and social position, associated with his deep domestic sorrow, which in- duced a state of profound despair, had seriously damaged his brain, and ultimately also affected his mind, and that, although in all probability ordinary observers did not notice in him any well-developed symptoms of insanity (and now often this is the case !) previously to the murder, the germs or elements of mental alienation were no doubt in existence, and the train of powder was laid, ready to be ignited directly the torch (an exciting cause) was applied." [Dr. Forbes Winslow adds here in a note :—"It is reported that at the time of the murder he was on the brink of starvation, and that he had only £75 in his possession, with no prospect of increasing his income."] '' I believe that in Mr. Watson's case the violent quarrel he had with his wife, the last no doubt of a series (and no revelation has yet been made as to the fearful struggle that then took place), acting upon an intensely overwrought and pro- bably congested brain, rendered, by the severe strain to which he had been exposed, acutely susceptible of morbid exaltation, developed a sudden burst of maniacal frenzy (not ordinary anger, as understood by the words, 'Ira furor brevis est'), and that in a state of paroxysmal madness (utterly destroying his capacity to distinguish between right and wrong) which this induced, committed the murder. His apparently rational conduct subsequent to the crime does not invalidate this theory. The hypothesis of melancholia alone could not explain the case ; for melancholia is rarely, if ever, found associated with homicidal impulses."
To which beautifully hypothetical answer Dr. Forbes Winslow only adds further that he fancies the famous Latin sentence as to the frequently injurious effect of persevering in an old love, is an indication "of an undetected delusion" in Mr. Watson's mind, in which we should quite agree, if "undetected delusion" means the same thing as a delusion which no one has detected, — certainly Dr. Winslow himself has no more detected it than a wizard with a cliviiiing-rod who says, There is gold hidden here,' has detected the gold if no gold can be found. Yet so clear is Dr. Forbes Winslow on this point, that he declares that Mr. Watson ought to have been carefully
watched by competent medical eyes for weeks in order to detect the "undetected delusion" which he is sure is there ! So much for this eminent person's view of Mr. Watson. It amounts briefly to this, Mr. Watson ought to have been ac- quitted on the plea of hypothetical "paroxysmal madness," and of an "undetected delusion,"—for which last skilled watchers should have watched lovingly till they found it. Now for the Llncet's editorial article. It urges that "so long as the poor man [Mr. Watson] saw before him any hope of obtaining a subsistence" (remember, curacies yielding £100 to £120 a year are to be had everywhere by properly quali- fied men),—" he bore all his troubles and his (probably severe) marital provocations with patience, showing a chas- tened and self-restrained temper which was not only respect- able, but admirable. It is equally plain that the shock of the loss of his situation thoroughly unhinged him, and from that moment he was a changed man. That the change really affected his whole mental balance seems clear from evidence as to his conduct before, during, and after the murder." The Lancet then quotes the evidence adduced as to his occasional forgetfulness, his nervousness in performing clerical duty, his talking to him- self, and his indifference to his situation after the murder, and the brutal circumstances of the murder, the excessive battering to which 'his poor victim was subjected,—all facts before the jury, all facts of a general nature, and in no degree whatever tech- nical, nor suggesting any technical inferences founded on medi- cal considerations, but purely and wholly of a common-sense kind, of the bearing of which twelve men with the prisoner before them and a good judge to guide them were infinitely better able to form a correct impression than a medical gentleman who writes in the absence of all these valuable aids to judgment, but in the presence apparently of a very strong and positive pre- possession. Among these " evidences " of insanity —(which, by the way, the Lancet accumulates without any reference whatever to the evidences of sanity, deciding that the proof of "clearness of intellect in some directions" is off the question,—though it can- not show proofs of unclearness of intellect in any direction)— where was there a single one which conveyed more meaning and would have more weight in the eyes of a trained physiologist and physician than in the eyes of a sensible man of the world ? Is it to be pretended that the habit of talking to yourself and occasionally shaking your fist in the street—on the part of a man who is known to have had a long-standing quarrel with his wife and subsequent victim,—conveys to a physician specific information of a lesion of the brain P Does the violent battering of the victim,—the instrument of murder was one which needed violent handling to be efficient for its purpose,— prove more to a physician than it proves to a judge or juryman ? If we are to be told that this sort of evidence has a special meaning for trained physiologists, we had better hand over all criminal and a good many civil cases into the hands of trained physiologists at once. They would probably prove to us that half the common assaults, and all offences admitting of being attributed to extreme poverty and accompanied by signs of agitation, are to the experienced eye of the physician obviously due to lesion of the brain.
The remarks of these great medical authorities on the case of Christiana Edmunds are still more remarkable. Dr. Forbes Winslow keeps to his cautious but not very instructive "might have beens." "It might have been found that she had an insane passion for Dr. Beard, and that she was under a delusion that he had encouraged it." No doubt it might, and it "might have been found " that Tropmann and Joseph Lemettre were under an insane delusion that they were Thugs and bound by the oaths of Thugs, but English law does not accept the vast store of an experienced "mad "-doctor's catalogue of possible delusions, as furnishing adequate grounds for acquittal under the very easy category of a "might have been." Dr. Forbes Winslow goes on to approve of Dr. Robertson's suggestion that Christiana Edmunds' act was "on the border-land between crime and insanity," belonging to a region which he called a tertium-quid, and which is peopled, he says, by a great colony of "quasi-lunatics," in evidence of whose existence he quotes a verse from Beattie ! And he literally has nothing on earth to say except that Dr. Robertson was "no doubt quite right in sup- posing that Christiana Edmunds formed one of these peculiar people,' and might have run well in harness with the celebrated murderess Constance Bent." No wonder Dr. Forbes Winslow adds that "definitions of insanity, in any of its types or forms, should be carefully avoided by the medical witness." It would be a very prudent precaution, and, as far as we can see, precisely for the same reason for which wise astrologers and other prophets "carefully avoid" codifying the scientific principles by which they judge. But in the case of Christiana Edmunds the Lancet beats Dr. Forbes Winslow hollow. It is very bold on the high a priori line,' and says what ought to mean, if it means any- thing, that she should have been shut up a year or two ago, at least before she had done anything wrong at all,—on the opinion of a couple of doctors, we suppose, that at "the critical age of forty-three" she must go mad by all the laws of physiology :—
" If there be one thing certainly proved in mental medicine, it is this,— that for any woman belonging to a family which (like that of the Edmunds's) was a prey to insanity and other nervous diseases, and liv- ing an involuntarily single life while struggling with hysteria and sup- pressed sexual feeling, it would be almost impossible to go on to the critical age of forty-three without actual derangement of mind. That her crime had a motive, and that her conduct was directed with an infernal cunning towards her end, is not in the least inconsistent with the worst forms of madness. We do not hesitate to say that had Christiana Edmunds been hanged, a judicial murder would have been committed."
Here is a woman who shows the acutest perception of the culpability of her own particular crime, indeed of a much lighter shade of crime than her own, though of the same class, and tries to rouse public indignation against it in an- other, who she well knows has not committed it; she has never betrayed the slightest alienation of intellect that any one can detect, though Dr. Forbes Winslow sees one of his invisible finger-posts to "an undetected delusion," and the most strenuous of her medical supporters in Court only ventured to vindicate for her a place in that " border-land between crime and insanity" which is peopled, we are assured, by so many " quasi-lunatics ; " yet the Lancet, in the plenitude of its medical infallibility, says the woman's insanity was already over-due, that it can speak "without a shade of the hesitation one feels in a doubtful case," and that if she had been hanged a "judicial murder would have been committed." Such dogmatism, founded on no technical grounds, which teaches, if it teaches anything, that a law should be passed to shut up persons with a certain proportion of ancestors of weak or shaken minds, whether such persons show signs of a weak intellect themselves or not, seems to us to tell much more against the foolish presumption of the medical profession in venturing be- yond the boundary of its proper art, than in favour of the persons on behalf of whom these confident opinions are pronounced. With such opinions before the public, itis well if people do not come to the conclusion that the dogmatism of those who are vulgarly termed "mad"-doctors is by no means on the border-land between medical knowledge and the pompous pretension which does not always conceal ignorance,—is, in fact, by no means an " undetected " de- lusion. Dr. Forbes Winslow and the Lancet will shake no sensible man's conviction that the judge and juries in the Watson and Edmonds' cases had far better data for deciding on the guilt of these unhappy culprits than any of the Judges in the Medical Courts of Cassation to which appeal is so often and so unfor- tunately made. We venture, moreover, to believe th•at had Mr. Watson been a bricklayer instead of a clergyman, and Miss Edmunds a nursemaid, we should have heard very little of these confident verdicts of insanity. Not, of course, that we mean to charge either Mr. Brace, who is a man of honour, or any of the doctors with intentionally making any class distinction,—as it suits Mr. Winterbothana's purpose to impute to us,—but only that these gentlemen cannot really be- lieve that persons of their own class could do such things with- out being insane,—a prepossession which, we submit, is wholly illegitimate. The Daily Telegraph has itself established this side of our case. What conceivable distinction,—except one in Addington the shoemaker's favour,—can be drawn between the crime for which Mr. Watson the clergyman is not to be hanged, and that for which Addington the shoemaker was hanged?
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