instruction on its proper field, know humanity only on its surface, and have not followed it, with the practical physician, closely and anxiously into its remotest recesses: and who, therefore, must remain alike incompetent to judge of the intrinsic nature of a mental malady in itself, or of the specialities, as well as the immense importance, of its relations to the family and to society. The experience of the lunatic asylum is a true and valuable experience, but, while we admit that it is singularly precious, it is to aver nevertheless that in itself it is not enough, because it falls short of the character which we have just indicated. The physician of such an institution does not see the sufferer at a sufficiently carly period to appreciate those causes and conditions which have produced or favoured the aberration; he has not observed the growing malady as it is affected by all the ordinary associations of life, its domestic influences, and its customary duties, and as it reacts upon these; and, when the patient is restored to society, he does not trace him in his resumption of his former habits, and watch him as he either intertwines himself with these thoroughly, or holds partially aloof with a still doubtful equanimity, awakening the suspicion of a danger only lurking, and not yet wholly subdued. It is a one-sided experience which knows the insane merely among the insane, and which cannot study him in the various phases and grades of his disorder, among the passions, the affections, and the reciprocal obligations of the mode of existence which the individual has been compelled to relinquish, and to which it is desired to procure his restoration. Besides, there can be no true or secure conceptions of either pathology or treatment, where the relations of insanity to general disease, and the relations of general disease to insanity, have not been first studied during a more or less prolonged familiarity with the range of general practice, and with the varied lessons which it conveys. Yet we cannot always free the mere specialist of the asylum from the charge of evincing a proneness to arrogate to himself a too exclusive competence on all questions relating to mental disorder, and to ignore the claims of those who, living beyond his seclusion, and practically familiar with the wide and general basis of medical science, can learn to know the disease and the world besides. It would be indeed unfortunate if the ordinary practitioner, charged as he is, in the immensely greater proportion of cases, with their sole treatment during the most interesting period of their development, and under that early stage in which they are the most susceptible of a cure, should not be the best fitted to judge of the causes of the disorder, and thence the most competent to suggest the means for its removal, including among the principal of these the possible necessity, always a distressing one, for restraint in an asylum. True, the superintendent of an extensive establishment for the insane sees ultimately the larger aggregate of cases, but he sees them only in certain of their stages, and under the control of modifying circumstances of a peculiar character, which necessarily limit, and may even warp, his means of judgment, involving him in the danger of biased views, and depriving these of the larger number of correctives. It is neither a justifiable nor a safe notion, that the asylum, under all circumstances, is the sole and indispensable resource for the management of mental disorder; nor does the regulation of the asylum embrace the entire field of duty. The dictator of this peculiar commonwealth, when he is to extend his authority elsewhere, has not only much to learn, but even much to unlearn, and many habits of thought and action of which he is to divest himself. The generally experienced physician will justly respect the high worth and talents of many of these specialists, but it is not necessary that he should thence submit to a discredit of his own pretensions. He will not readily forget that Pinel, the great master who gave first in France a humane and rational direction to the treatment of insanity, was no exclusive specialist, but a physician in general practice; and that it was to the author of the Nosographie Philosophique' that we are indebted for the 'Traité de l'Aliénation Mentale.' Nor will he forget that our own Prichard, the author of the best systematic treatise on insanity in our language, joined also to his extensive attainments otherwise, the like wide basis for a general knowledge of the science of medicine. It is not the extent merely, but the extent in relation to the quality, of the experience, which teaches; and it is less the scope than the capacity of observation, that turns the lesson to profit. Many are thus entitled to say with Hecquet :-"Je sais qu'il y en a qui voient beaucoup de malades, mais je vois peut-être plus de maladies." Impressed with the vast interest and importance of the theme of insanity generally, we feel that our interest deepens when we are compelled to survey it under the phases presented to us by the description of treatise now before us. The lunatic, as a sufferer in the abstract, had already an irresistible claim upon our sympathies: but the lunatic, as implicated in, or stripped of his individual and civil rights, or as prone to acts involving him in questions of criminal accountability, has an infinitely stronger title to our commiseration; and the idea of the possibility of judging him harshly, or upon any bare plea of legal or social expediency, seems to be ready to recoil in condemnation upon ourselves, if we could suppose ourselves to be its abettors. We know that the balance must be evenly held; that to extend the shield from the guardianship of the truly insane to the protection of the merely vicious, would be a dangerous error, producing, like all errors, its mischievous reaction; and that the utmost caution must be used lest charity should mislead justice, for the worth and dignity of the latter does not lie in its power, but in its truth. We are aware, of course, that this degree of caution has not been uniformly exercised by all our writers on forensic psychology; and that, on the contrary, an originally humane and partially just idea has been sometimes fostered into a crotchet, till its undue obtrusion has provoked an antagonism between law and medicine little to the credit or advantage of either. In any remarks suggested to us during a perusal of either of our authors, on the subject of the medico-legal relations of insanity, or on points arising incidentally from the consideration of their theme, our leading anxiety will be to avoid this error. Professor Ideler has been long known as an able writer on a variety of topics connected with disease of the mind. In his previous publications he has always distinguished himself as a strong and sound reasoner, and we once more gladly recognise this characteristic in the volume before us. His treatise presents us with a comprehensive view of a subject often abstruse and difficult, and involving, were it for this reason only, numerous points of contest. Beginning with the discussion of the topic of moral liberty, he reviews this in its relations to the intellect and to the affections, as well as to the will, and examines the influences to which it is naturally subjected through the various states of the living organization, and the extrinsic conditions of existence. His primary ideas on the subject having thus moulded themselves into the requisite precision, he next extends his inquiry to the consideration of the principle of moral freedom as lying at the basis of all our notions of what constitutes the essence of crime, and of the just application of penal law; examining into the limits and degrees of accountability, and into the competence of physicians to determine as to these, along with the necessary appreciation of the motives of action. Having secured this as the first part of his groundwork, he now surveys the different faculties of our moral nature, passing before him in succession the consciousness, the power of conception, the emotions, affections, and the passions, and treating the operations of the more energetic of these in detail, as well as in their relations to each other reciprocally, as to the faculties of the intelligence, and to the influences of the social system. The modifying effects of physical disease are then considered, and general rules are supplied for estimating the bearing of these upon the condition of moral freedom. After this cautious preparation, the author approaches more closely the examination of the special disorders of the mind, first rapidly surveying the general doctrines of insanity, and then reviewing separately its various forms of monomania, mania, melancholia, incoherence, and amentia, attaching to each the consideration of its effects upon the accountability of the individual. Some observations on simulated insanity, and a sketch of what he terms the more doubtful affections of the mind, including homicidal monomania, mania transitoria, dipsomania, amentia occulta, pyromania, kleptomania, and suicide, complete the outline of his interesting treatise. A work so carefully elaborated has not been an easy labour, and we must even own that its assiduous perusal, demanding as it does a continuously earnest attention and reflection, and supplying interminable materials of suggestion, requires no insignificant effort of the intelligence. For him that desires a treatise which he that runs may read, the volume of Professor Ideler will present comparatively few attractions. The author is not one of those who seize a favourite dogma, and, complacently veiling it under a tissue of assumptions, force it upon us and upon the public as the reasoned exposition of an incontrovertible principle. His views, on the contrary, are always elicited with care, and stated with becoming moderation. He acknowledges the right of society to be protected in its peace and safety against every undue enforcement of the plea of criminal irresponsibility, and he respects in the magistrate those scruples which occasionally hesitate to acknowledge the results of a disease, where they may seem entitled to recognise only a vice or a crime. But he is not the less the strenuous assertor of the mournful privilege of true insanity to secure immunity from punishment; while, the better to ensure it, he is zealous in his attempts to demonstrate upon what grounds alone this immunity can be justly vindicated, and to discriminate the conditions under which there ought to be no pretence to claim its protection. In short, he is one who knows what is that proper position, to which we have already alluded, of the forensic psychologist, in relation to the dispensation of justice; and he has no wish to arrogate to himself the functions of the judge and of the Court, but rather, in seeking to reconcile his respect for constituted authority with his sense of a peculiar duty, takes common experience for his guide, and finds evidently no difficulty in the effort. It is here, of course, impossible for us to enter largely into any general discussion of the multiform topics embraced in Professor Ideler's treatise. In glancing over them we have been willing, therefore, rather to select one as a more especial subject for comment; and adopting this view, none seemed to us more important or more eligible otherwise from the interest it has been recently exciting in this country, than that of the medico-legal relations of the so-called dipsomania, or inveterate proneness to states of drunkenness, to which the author has devoted a judicious chapter. In the tenor of our remarks we shall be found to differ less from Professor Ideler in essential particulars, than in the mode of development of our views, and the occasionally greater amplification of certain portions of them. The vice of habitual drunkenness, we need hardly remark, continued for long to be regarded everywhere as the subject of merely police regulation; and the crimes, for the most part of violence, to which it gave rise, came under the common category of offences to be repressed by the arm of the law, under no other limits than the ordinary rules of justice. Some of these police regulations were sufficiently severe, indicating beyond doubt a sense of the magnitude of the evil, but still more that harshness which was then the too prevailing characteristic of our codes. Yet the history of the conditions of society, until a very recent period, shows how vain was this attempt to restrain by legislative rigour what was not controlled by morals. The Church and the State fulminated everywhere their reprobation of the gross and prevailing excess, but the bolts fell harmless when they were wielded through the means of a judge who sat mellow on the bench, or of a priest who hiccuped in the pulpit. Our Scotch friends are not, we observe, universally satisfied with a recent law, shutting the taverns daily after eleven at night, and throughout the whole of the Sundays, yet in the old Catholic times, prescriptively entitled merry, we find it more rigorously ordained: "That na man in Burgh be founden in Tavernes of wine, ail, or beir, efter the straike of nine houres, and the bell that sall be rungin in the said Burgh. The quhilkis founden, the Alderman and Baillies sall put them in the Kingis prison: The quhilk, gif they do not, they sall pay for ilk time that they be founden culpabill before the Chamerlane fyftie schillinges.' * Act of King James I., parl. xiii. (An. 1486), c. 144. We thus observe here already a manifest indication, that the magistrate was suspected of a bias towards undue leniency in the repression of a fault, which had commonly, in all likelihood, something more than his sympathies. In Sweden, drunkenness was punished on the three first occasions by a gradually augmented fine; on a fourth by a loss of political privilege; on a fifth by a short imprisonment in the House of Correction: and on a sixth, the imprisonment was extended to no less than a year. In several of the German states, the vice was denounced habitually, under threats of heavy penalties. Yet, so thoroughly, nevertheless, did the propensity remain rooted everywhere in the social habits of the times, that even the popular jests regarding it have a kind of cosmopolitan diffusion. The Scottish clergyman of the last century, who, preaching against drunkenness, did not fail to find a plausible reason for a dram in the morning, to be repeated in the forenoon, with another before dinner, and another after dinner, and another at night, yet could not tolerate the perpetual drinking to which some of his parishioners were addicted, is well represented elsewhere by the German suffragan bishop, of whose sermon Goethe offers a specimen in his 'Reise am Rhein, Mayn und Neckar.' The worthy prelate, cautioning his hearers against excess and its results, which he painted in strong colours, reminded them that there were few to whom had been vouchsafed, as to him, the power of drinking eight quarts without ever having been once chargeable with abuse of his friends or household, or neglect of his sacred duties. It was this thorough intertwining of convivial recklessness among the habits of the people, that set at defiance all attempts at a serious repression; and so wide and recent was the contagion, that Mr. Gunning, the Senior Esquire Bedell at Cambridge at the close of the last century, was even then able to tell us, in his gossiping reminiscences, that intemperance was still so completely the besetting sin of the day, as to induce him to record as something remarkable, that there was one of his University friends whom he had never seen drunk. How public opinion, however, in one of its stronger revulsions, has dealt with this since, and how different is now the vantage-ground of the social reformer, it is scarcely necessary for us to indicate. It appears paradoxical, yet it is not really inconsistent, that, with the recent gradual improvement in the manners of the nations of Europe in relation to habits of drinking, there has been a coincident relaxation in the severity of our penal laws; and that not merely generally, but with especial reference to crimes committed under the influence of intoxication. Where justice is weak, it is always vindictive; and, at the former period, it became aroused and struck fiercely at intervals, as if to atone for the natural results of its ordinary remissness. We may judge that it was a true detestation of the vice of drunkenness which induced Pittacus, six centuries before Christ, to attach, as we are told, a double penalty to all crimes committed during intoxication; because the ancient Greeks, like the Romans, were really remarkable for sobriety, and this description of excess, though well known. to them, was by no means usual, and still less was held in honour. The maxim of the old lawgiver, however, seems to have passed over into many of our modern codes where there was not the same substantial basis in the habits of the people to sustain its authority, though there was indeed far more to justify its necessity. But there was a prevalent heedlessness of human life during the middle ages, which has only recently been everywhere extensively mitigated; and the same rough spirit which turned easily, in all classes, the debauch into the broil, and the broil into the serious injury of person or destruction of life, dictated the measure of retaliation, and exacted a penalty which was sometimes little commensurate with the intrinsic quality of the offence. Yet, even in the sixteenth century, the principle in law, that a crime was not punishable when committed under the deprivation of reason, began, in many of the states of Germany, to have its modified applications to offences during, and the result of intoxication. Long before then, though less directly enunciated, it had evinced its influence in other countries. Thus, in Spain, so early as the middle of the thirteenth century, in the famous code of the Siete Partidas, the work of King Alonzo IX., surnamed the Wise, we find it enacted, while murder generally was punishable by death, that if any one should so intoxicate himself, that he should kill another through violence committed during his drunkenness, as the death was through his own fault, the perpetrator was to be banished into an island for a period of five years.* In this country, however, the rigid letter of the law still tells us, though the application of the rule has neither been always thoroughly uniform nor without hesitation, that no person has any privilege of excuse through this voluntarily contracted madness. In the penal code of France, the state of drunkenness of the accused is not mentioned as modifying the accountability for crime; but there has been a growing disposition on the part of juries to interpret, as extending its merciful influence over this class of offences, the sixty-fourth clause of the code, which determines that there is no imputation of crime where the perpetrator was in a state of dementia at the time of the action, or where he was constrained by a force which he could not resist. In like manner, the fortieth clause of the penal code of Prussia enacts, that no crime is imputable where the perpetrator was insane or imbecile at the time of the event; and here, too, there has been an increasing disposition to include under this category all offences committed during a state of intoxication. The code of Austria, on the other hand, is more exact and determinate in its provisions on this subject. According to the third clause of its second section, no crime is imputable when the act was committed during a state of advanced intoxication, not designedly premeditated, or during any other condition of mental disturbance in which the individual is not conscious of the nature of the action; and this is irrespective of actual insanity, which is provided for in the two preceding clauses. But, with now all the deeper justice, the drunkenness itself, where it has led to an act of violence, is here punishable as an offence (236): and this punishment is fixed at an imprisonment of from one to three months; while, where the individual was aware, from previous experience, of his usually furious tendencies when intoxicated, the imprisonment was to be more rigorous in itself, and became extended, for especially flagrant instances, to a period of half a year. In Würtemberg the qualification proceeds even further, and declares a diminished responsibility for those lower grades of intoxication, where accountability could not be held to have become extinguished, yet where the individual was unable to perceive the full tendency of the danger and criminality of his conduct. But even this degree of leniency, extraordinary, or even unintelligible, as we suspect it must appear to most among ourselves, has not sufficed for many of the medical psychologists of the Continent. Not content with the concession that the actual state of intoxication was to be accepted as a condition of temporary insanity, and its acts to be sheltered, to a wide extent, under the corresponding immunity, they have insisted that the inveterate drunkard should be regarded as habitually under the influence of an insane impulse, which it was impossible for him to resist, and for the results of which, therefore, he was not responsible; while a few have even proceeded so far as to pronounce him, even in his sober intervals, as so manifestly of a biassed or perverted understanding, as to have ceased, solely because a drunkard, to be an accountable being. It has been customary to assign the initiative of this doctrine, though scarcely with justice, to the treatise of Brühl-Cramer, a physician practising in Moscow towards the commencement of this century. But it seems to us rather to have derived its origin from a disquisition, De Amentia Vinolenta,' by Platner, a professor at Leipzig, which was published in 1809, and which has been comparatively little remembered. In the views of Platner we find clearly indicated,§ and referred, as his title implies, to a basis of disordered mental condition, those dogmas which have since expanded with others into greater breadth, and acquired greater prominence. The object * Las Siete Partidas del Sabio Rey Don Alonzo el Nono, Ley v. Tit. viii. Partida viii. Das Strafgesetz für das Kaiserthum Oesterreich (1858), Theil i. § 2. Platner, Questiones Medicina Forensis (ed. Choulant), p, 266. |