1919-20.] Obituary Notices. 193 
and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a 
Corresponding Fellow of the Medical Society of London. 
For several years he was Professor of Psychiatry at Cornell Medical 
College in New York, and was Honorary Member of the American 
Neurological Association and the New York Psychiatrical Society at 
the time of his death. A few years ago Hamilton College bestowed 
a degree upon him. 
For many years Dr Hamilton’s name was connected with most of 
the great criminal cases and prominent trials of will cases, and he 
became an authority on medical jurisprudence. He was also engaged 
as expert in many railroad litigations due to accidents, and wrote a 
book on Railway Accidents and Other Injuries. He was the author 
of A System of Legal Medicine, widely used both in the States and 
abroad, and was a frequent contributor to the North American Review, 
the Century, and Scribner s Magazine. He used every effort to reform 
expert testimony, and to the day of his death maintained that the 
famous Thaw trial had killed all expert testimony and ruined the 
career of alienists. He believed that all experts should be selected by 
Government as purely disinterested witnesses. 
Dr Hamilton’s first great case as an alienist was that of Guiteau, 
murderer of President Garfield. Hamilton was called to testify for 
the Government, and Guiteau was adjudged sane. He was also a 
prominent figure in the celebrated Maria Barbieri case, the Patrick 
will case, the Molineux poison case, and that of Csolgosz, the assassin 
of President M‘Kinley. 
In the summer of 1907 Dr Hamilton was sent for by Mrs Mary Baker 
Eddy, founder of Christian Science, to examine her mental condition with 
a view to testifying as to her capacity to manage her financial and other 
affairs ; and the account of the interviews he had with her is told in his 
last book, Recollections of an Alienist. 
For fifty years Dr Hamilton worked in New York, and he had a large 
private practice for many years until he became absorbed in the larger 
interests in the law courts. 
In 1910 he published the Intimate Life of Alexander Hamilton. 
At the time of his death last November, he had in mind further 
“ Recollections,” and amongst his papers are jottings and notes for an 
essay on “ Four Great Wits.” 
Dr Hamilton wrote and spoke most strongly against abuses in insane 
asylums, and after seeing three executions in Sing Sing Prison was an 
ardent advocate of the abolition of the electric chair. In 1902 he suffered 
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