Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/455

Rh men of common-sense, are quite as well able as medical men to say whether a person is insane or not. In the last number of this Journal we gave a report of a trial which took place in Scotland for the reduction of a will, in which the judge directed the jury, with the greatest assurance, that the symptoms which preceded insanity and indicated its approach, in an ordinary case, went on increasing as the disease advanced, and implied that, as they had not done so in the case in question, it was preposterous to allege insanity.

To our mind, the evidence of insanity in that case was conclusive, but at any rate the statement of the judge was utterly untrue, as a very little knowledge of insanity would have taught him; and we cannot help thinking that the authoritative enunciation of such false doctrine to a jury is nothing less than a judicial misdemeanor. One cannot justly complain that judges should be ignorant of insanity, seeing that only by long experience and study is a true knowledge of it to be acquired; but it is a fair ground of complaint that, being ignorant, they should speak as confidently and as foolishly as they sometimes do. Here, as in other scientific matters, it is not intuition, but experience, which giveth understanding.

Not only is it the fact that judges are ignorant, but they are too often hostile. Governed by the old and barbarous dictum that knowledge of right and wrong is the proper criterion of responsibility when insanity is alleged, they resent angrily the allegation of insanity in any case in which the person has not lost all knowledge of right and wrong. Believing that medical men are striving to snatch the accused person from their jurisdiction, they are jealous of interference, are eager to secure a conviction, and sometimes lose the impartiality becoming the judge in the zeal proper to the partisan. The reporters are happily good to them, in forbearing to report all they say and do, or we fear that the dignity of the bench would have suffered more in public estimation even than it has done of late years.

It is useless to say smooth things when things are not smooth. There is a direct conflict between medical knowledge and judge-made law, which must go on until bad law is superseded by just principles