46 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 



It is difficult for medical men to listen to lawyers discoursing on 

 diseases of the brain and of the nervous system ; and on the other 

 hand the lawyers and judges thought and think that they know as 

 much of the functions of feeling and knowing of emotion and willing 

 as is permitted to the medical gentlemen. 



The jurisprudence of insanity is in consequence a subject claimed 

 by doctors and by lawyers. It is one of those debatable territories 

 on the border lands of two sciences that needs the assistance of the 

 best minds in both ; . but it so happens that these are not always in 

 harmony, indeed sometimes in apparent or real contradiction. Each 

 one claims to be the real judge or the sole judge, and each disputes 

 the right of the other to decide what may be common issues. 



The medical men assert that common sense and science are with 

 them, and it may be so ; but the fact is that the legal luminaries 

 have not only the law, but what is more important the verdict on 

 their side. The conflict continues apace. The Courts and the lawyers 

 have retained for a long time their view of the matter, and are 

 unmoved by any advancements in the medical world. The medical 

 writers adhere to their own views, and are not sparing in their 

 ridicule of unskilled persons meddling with things of which they 

 know nothing. 



" The ground which medical men should firmly and consistently 

 take in regard to insanity," says Henry Maudsley, "is that it is a 

 physical disease ; that they alone are competent to decide upon its 

 presence or absence ; and that it is quite as abourd for lawyers or the 

 general public to give their opinion in a doubtful case, as it would 

 be for them to do so in a case of fever." 



Mr. Balfour Brown replies to this as follows : — " No lawyer wants, 

 so far as we know, to give his opinion either as to insanity or as to 

 fever. He does not profess to be able to do so, but he does assert 

 that he and the public ai-e in a position to judge of conduct, that the 

 proof of the existence of such insanity as incapacitates for civil acts 

 or renders an individual irresponsible in case of the commission of a 

 criminal outrage lies in conduct, and that the fact that in the case 

 of the insane the act is the result of certain changes which medical 

 men have chosen to call disease, and that in the other it is due to 

 certain changes which medical men have with as much arbitrariness 

 chosen to call health, has nothing whatever to do with the subject." 



