534 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



CONDEMNATION OF CRIMINALS NOT PUNISHMENT.* 



By EDWARD F. BRUSH, M. D. 



WHEN studying a subject closely, we often discover that a 

 simple word influences for right or wrong the whole matter, 

 just as change of a note makes a different tune, or alters entirely 

 the tone of the song. As Roget says : "A misapplied or misappre- 

 hended term is sufficient to give rise to fierce and interminable 

 disputes ; a misnomer has turned the tide of popular opinion ; a 

 verbal sophism has decided a party question ; an artful watch- 

 word thrown among combustible material has kindled a flame of 

 deadly warfare and changed the destiny of an empire." The word 

 "punishment,'' as commonly used and understood judicially, 

 should be eliminated from the tribunals that have to deal with 

 that part of society that is known as the criminal class. Some 

 one has said that jurists recognize only two terms in criminal law, 

 "offense" and " punishment." The simplest and earliest defini- 

 tion of punishment is "to afflict with pain," and whenever the 

 word is used it carries with it the idea or notion of consequent 

 suffering. "There is undoubtedly a moral element in words; 

 words are not neutral in the great conflict between good and 

 evil, nor are there wanting, I suppose, in any language words 

 that are the mournful record of the strange wickednesses which 

 the genius of man, so fertile in evil, has invented." To the stu- 

 dent of history does not the word punishment bring before the 

 mind the cruel atrocities and horrible inflictions of the middle 

 ages, with their gibbets, chains, racks, hot pincers, thumbscrews, 

 and other hellish devices ? It is a strange perversity of the hu- 

 man mind that many, very many words have deteriorated in their 

 meaning ; the word retaliation nowadays is never used to ex- 

 press a return of benefits, but always the paying of wrongs by 

 wrongs ; animosity, which was originally a very harmless word, 

 is now used only to denote enmity and hate. I can recall no 

 word that has taken the opposite course in our language, and the 

 word punishment has now come by downward evolution from 

 its original use to denote a spirit of vengeance, with its hatred, 

 malice, and retribution, in the degraded sense of that word. 

 Trench truthfully says : "There are often in words, contemplated 

 singly, stores of passion as well as of historic truth ; they are liv- 

 ing powers, and quite as often and effectually embody facts of 

 history or conviction of the moral common sense as of the imagi- 

 nation or passion of man ; even as, so far as that moral sense may 



* Presidential address delivered before the Society of Medical Jurisprudence at its 

 annual meeting, held January 13, 1896. 



