Suggestions for rendering Medico-Mental Science available to the better Administration of Justice and the more effectual Prevention of Lunacy and Crime

Abstract

That medico-mental science is often at variance with the doctrines and decisions of the courts of law is a fact too well known and too generally admitted to need formal proof. It is almost as generally assumed that the scandalous failures of justice, which too often result, must be attributed to the defective education and knowledge of the profession. It is alleged that, as a body, we are for the most part ignorant and theoretical in matters relating to insanity, and if not ignorant, then presuming, and often using the little knowledge we possess, rather with the intent to rescue thieves and murderers from the legal consequences of their crimes than to help the administration of justice. It is certainly a fact which many of us lament that the corporate bodies of the profession generally, including the general medical council, ignore the subject as a distinct department of medical education; and consequently medical practitioners, not being duly trained, do sometimes appear to great disadvantage in courts of law. Medical shortcomings are not, however, the subject of my paper, but certain fundamental defects in the principles and procedures of the law which render medico-mental science sometimes even worse than useless, and always less useful to the commonweal than it might be, if rightly adapted to the needs of modern society. Nor would it be difficult to show that some of the crime and folly which occupies our courts and fills our reformatories, prisons, workhouses, and lunatic asylums, is capable of prevention by a well-devised use of medico-mental science. As these matters are wholly beyond the powers of the profession, I shall ask leave to move at the close of the discussion that a committee be appointed, with power to take such steps as may be thought necessary to secure a thorough inquiry by the Government into the relations of medical science to the administration of the law in regard to all persons mentally disordered or defective, with a view to such improvements as may be practicable.