Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/88

 Ixxviii INTRODUCTION

but the book, as a matter of course, aroused a much larger and more atonishing interest. The doctors and lawyers of Europe for a moment ceased sneering, sat up, then gasped: "And is this fountain of scien- tific knowledge aflow in America? ' Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?' "

Dr. Beck's book was certainly better than any yet out in either Europe or America, excepting, possibly, that of Fodere. To the present time it has not ceased to be an authority both at home and abroad. An English edition appeared in 1825 — two years after the first American one, and by the time of the author's decease, four English, one German, and five American editions had been issued. Since his death, another American, and even a Swedish, edition, has been issued. Traill, the great Scotch legal physician, called this very remarkable treatise "the best work on the general subject which has appeared in the English language." The famous Guy "acknowledges his obligations in a special manner to Beck's learned and elaborate ' Elements of Medical Jurisprudence.'" And at the present day, Prof. Rudolph A. Witthaus declares this scientific classic "facile princeps among English works on legal medicine ... as admirable for scholarly elegance of diction as for profound scientific research."

Considerably later than Beck's great treatise (in 1838) appeared a work by Dr. I. Ray, entitled, "The Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity." Says Ray, in his preface to the first edition: "... the English lan- guage does not furnish a single work in which the various forms and degrees of mental derangement are treated in reference to their effect on the rights and duties of man." To supply this very deplorable deficiency was the object of his book. And so well indeed did the doctor write that the volume has not been entirely superseded to the present day. It was rivaled, but not excelled (in 1878), by Ordronaux's "Judicial Aspects of Insanity." Ray was the first, so far as I know, who wrote not only in the English language, as he claimed, but even in any language, upon the medical jurisprudence of insanity. Many other writers had expatiated freely on the subject in general, and a few had even imagined that they had dealt with the legal relations of mental incompetence, but that was only because they did not understand how numerous and complicated those legal relations are. Ray's work is a legal consideration of the subject, not merely an exposition of the diseases of the mind with here and there a legal consequence adverted to.

No less important than his matter is Ray's distinctive manner. There is not a dull page in the whole of a rather large book. Solid and serious, he is never prosaic, and has that full and copious utter- ance which renders his pages the pleasantest of reading. His words come forth in a steady profusion, rolling easily on and on, from appar-