the frightful domestic unhappiness. In most of these cases there is but slight apparent intellectual disorder, although careful investigation would frequently discover a concealed delusion, and the greatest difficulty exists in obtaining a certificate of lunacy from two medical men. They shrink from the responsibility. Nothing is done. Prolonged misery or a terrible catastrophe is the result. To avoid this, there might be a power vested in the Commissioners in Lunacy to appoint, on application, two medical men, familiar with insanity, to examine a person under such circumstances. Their certificate that he or she ought to be placed under care should be a sufficient warrant for admission into an asylum, and they should not be liable to any legal consequences. It should not be necessary for the signers of the certificate to comply with the usual formalities. The Commissioners should have power to grant an application of this kind, whether made by a member of the family or by a respectable inhabitant of the place in which the alleged lunatic resides; his respectability, if necessary, being attested by the mayor.

The other suggestion has reference to the strange and clumsy way in which the English law goes to work to discover whether a man charged with crime and suspected to be insane is so in reality. It is a chance in the first place whether he is examined by a medical man at all. If he can afford counsel, and the plea of insanity is set up, medical testimony is adduced of a one-sided character, and, more likely than not, counter medical evidence is brought forward by the prosecution. Thus physicians enter the court as partisans, and being in a

284

VISIT OF FOREIGNERS.

false position, often present an unfortunate spectacle; while, worst of all, the truth is not elicited.

Then, it not unfrequently happens that after the trial the thing is done which should have been done previously ; experts in insanity are employed to decide upon the prisoner's state of mind. The court should call such experts to their assistance at the trial, and, what is most important, ample time should be allowed to examine the suspected lunatic. In France the "Juge d'instruction" requests neutral experts to examine and report upon the accused, and I have recently been assured by physicians in Paris, with whom I have discussed this point, that the plan, on the whole, works well. Is it too much to hope that common sense will guide our own law-makers to introduce a similar practice?*

During the meeting of the International Medical Congress, 1881, a party of distinguished men from other lands visited Broadmoor, including MM. Foville and Motet, Professors Hitchcock, Ball, Tamburini, Dr. Müller, and Dr. Whitmer. We shall always remember the day with pleasure. One result was an interesting narrative of the visit by M. Motet of Paris. We met at "Waterloo," and it was gratifying to think of the different feelings under which representatives of the French and English assembled, from those experienced on the battle-field to which the station owes its name.

*For detailed account of the French law, which in some particulars may require greater safeguards, see article by the author, "Mental Experts and Criminal Responsibility," Journal of Mental Science, edited by Dr. D. Hack Tuke and Dr. George H. Savage, April, 1882. For more information respecting criminal lunatics, see Appendix L.

( 285 )

CHAPTER VII.

OUR CHANCERY LUNATICS.

OF the relations of lunatics to that Court which Dickens describes as having its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, its worn-out lunatic in every mad-house, and its dead in every churchyard, we must briefly speak, and in many respects speak favourably. It may have been true that "the Court of Chancery gives to moneyed might the means abundantly of wearying out the right; so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope; so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart; that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give-who does not often give— the warning, 'Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than come here!"" But whatever this "most pestilent of hoary sinners" may have been in the past, it has, through its Lord Chancellor's Visitors, performed its duty towards its "worn-out lunatics," not only "in every mad-house," but in many a home in which they enjoy as much liberty as possible, while the property of which they are incompetent to take charge. is carefully administered

286

IMPORTANCE OF PRIVATE DWELLINGS.

by the Lord Chancellor. In his Address at the eighth section of the International Congress, Dr. Lockhart Robertson pointed out that 346 per cent. of the Chancery lunatics are treated in private dwellings. Hence 65:4 per cent. are in asylums-a striking contrast to 94 per cent. of private patients in asylums under the Lunacy Commissioners. Dr. Robertson concludes that some 30 per cent. of these are, therefore, in asylums needlessly, and hence wrongly. The fact is important, and will attract, it is to be hoped, more attention than hitherto, although I can hardly see that it follows that all these patients referred to are "wrongly confined," or would be better elsewhere. I would, however, reiterate what has been insisted upon in a former chapter, that, essential as asylums are, a large number of patients may be comfortably placed under other and less restrictive conditions.

By what steps we have arrived at our present, on the whole, satisfactory if incomplete, legislation for the protection of the property of the insane, is an inquiry by, no means unprofitable and uninteresting, and I propose in a short chapter to trace them rapidly, with a brief reference to successive Acts of Parliament.*

It is needful to premise that Blackstone's definition of an idiot was "that he is one who hath had no understanding from his nativity, and therefore is by law presumed never likely to attain any." "He is not an idiot if he hath any glimmering of reason, so that he can

*Free use has been made of Shelford's "Law concerning Lunatics, etc.," and Elmer's "Practice in Lunacy," 1877.

ACTS OF EDWARD I. AND II.

287

tell his parents, his age, or the like common matters." From such a condition the law clearly distinguished the lunatic, or non compos mentis, who is "one who hath had understanding, but by disease, grief, or other accident. hath lost the use of his reason." The lunatic was

assumed to have lucid intervals, these depending frequently, it was supposed, upon the change of the moon. Others who became insane-or, as it was expressed, "under frenzies "-were also comprised under the term non compos mentis.

The law varied in accordance with these distinctions, the charge of the lunatic being intrusted to the king, and the custody of the idiot and his lands vested in the feudal lord, though eventually, in consequence of flagrant abuses, it was transferred to the Crown in the reign of Edward I. by an Act now lost, which was confirmed by Edward II., 1324. This marks the earliest Act extant (17 Edward II., c. 9) passed for the benefit of mentally affected persons. The words run :-"The king shall have the custody of the lands of natural fools, taking the profits of them without waste or destruction, and shall find them their necessaries, of whose fee socver the lands be holden. And after the death of such idiots he shall render them to the right heirs; so that by such idiots no alienation shall be made, nor shall their heirs be disinherited." *

* "Rex habet custodiam terrarum fatuorum naturalium, capiendo exitus earundem sine vasto et destructione et inveniet eis necessaria sua de cujus cumque fœdo terre ille fuerint; et post mortem eorum reddat eas (eam) rectis hæredibus ita quod nullatenus per eosdem fatuos alienentur vel (nec quod) eorum hæredes exheredentur."