720 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
and detestation. He persevered. Before the court he produced the highest 
medical testimony, proving the existence of disease, which he maintained had 
touched the citadel of the man's reason and destroyed it. His labor for the 
time was unavailing, but before the day for the execution of the doomed man 
came death entered his cell door, even as Mr. Seward in his remarkable address 
to the jury told them medical science indicated. Then came the post mortem 
examination and lo, the dullest could see that the description Mr. Seward had 
given of the last stage of the diseased brain was based on unerring scientific re- 
search. 
The press has lately been discussing the question of momentary or emotional 
insanity as proved in the Nutt trial at Pittsburg. From the general tenor of its 
reflections one would suppose that this state of mind was a barrier between the 
act and the doer of it erected with much pains and skill by the two professions. 
But it is nothing new. The insanity of Mary Lamb, which in a lurid moment 
made her a matricide, was of this broken nature. 
With what weird words does DeQuincey paint this funereal shadow in the 
lives of the brother and sister : '' Peace for you two, Charles and Mary Lamb ! 
What peace is possible under the curse which even now is gathering against your 
heads ? Is there peace on earth for the lunatic, peace for the parenticide, peace 
for the girl that without warning and without time granted for a penitential cry 
to heaven sends her mother to the last audit? Thou, also, thyself, Charles 
Lamb, thou in thy proper person shalt enter the skirts of this dreadful hail-storm ; 
even thou shalt taste the secrets of lunacy and enter as a captive its house of 
bondage. ' ' 
The frequency of Mary Lamb's paroxysms of dethroned reason and the lofty 
and unshrinking devotion of her brother through forty years of this strange life, 
is one of the most affecting narratives in the iiistory of this dread disease. 
Macbeth thus implores his physicians : 
" Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased ; 
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow ; 
Raze out the written troubles of the brain ; 
And, with some sweet oblivious antidote, 
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff 
Which weighs upon the heart?" 
Our asylums for the insane are constantly sending from their doors those 
whose aberrations of mind have proved to be only temporary and susceptible of 
alleviation and cure. Doubtless the tribunal that finally determines whether the 
man was so distempered in mind as to be absolved from the consequences of his 
deed could be constituted out of better material than it usually is; a body of dis- 
interested educated medical men should listen to this expert testimony, and pass 
the last opinion upon that phase of the case. But the fact remains that insanity, 
whether congenital and permanent, or only flecking here and there the lucidity 
of the mind, must ever be considered as an important legal defense to otherwise 
