Democratic Sentinel, Volume 10, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 November 1886 — Mental Disease. [ARTICLE]

Mental Disease.

It would have been more accurate to specify crime, instead of speaking vaguely of sin. The Saturday net iew, in an article on this topic, restates and professes to find approximate satisfaction in the familiar legal questions about insanity: “Did he know that what he was doing wrong? If he did, could he help doing it?” We are unfortunately compelled by the facts of the case to join issue, and contend that a man may know he is doing wrong, and do it without obligations or impulse of any sort, and yet be insane. There is unquestionably such a thing as “moral insanity”—that is, insanity of the conscience of morality; and this particular form of mental disease—for such it is—cannot unhappily be very readily or certainly distinguished from that depravity of the moral sense which characterizes alike low developments and what Herbert Spencer has designated, and Hughlings-Jackson has demonstrated in pathology, as “dissolution.” There will be no substantial progress in the study of mental disease until tiiis branch of science is rescued from the toils of the lawyers. The judges, by their formulation of imperfect views of facts in medicine—and therefore beyond the province of r onmedical observers, however able and acute —have done violence to truth and principle, and they have placed a great stumbling-block in the way of the doctors. For the present we must stand on the defensive, and may in all truthfulness be described as lost in amazement at the wondrous and inexpl cable folly of those who, while attempting to recognize a disease and to discriminate between it and health, should set themselves against the study of the only methods by which diagnosis, in a medical sense, can be safely or successfully performed. —The Lancet.