A System of Legal Medicine V 2 Author:Allan McLane Hamilton Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MENTAL RESPONSIBILITY OF THE INSANE IN CIVIL CASES. CALVIN E. PRATT, Justice of N. Y. Supreme Court. Insanity is the generic term which includes lunacy,... more » derangement, mania, frenzy, madness, delirium, alienation, aberration, dementia, and monomania; each of these terms has a well-known definition, and each form of mental disease has its well-marked symptoms and characteristics. No definition of insanity is entirely satisfactory to all lawyers or doctors, or seems to cover all cases that can arise. Cases of what is called emotional insanity, morbid and irresistible impulse, hypnotism, epilepsy, moral insanity, and various abnormal mental manifestations that occur, or are claimed to occur, make it difficult to construct a short and simple definition fit for practical and universal use in courts of justice. Perhaps as satisfactory a definition as can be given in a pathological sense is that of Dr. Hammond: " That person is insane whose mental processes are directly at variance with those of the average human mind." This is a medical definition. In law, however, the question is not whether insanity exists in a medical sense, but whether there exists that kind and dryif of aberration of mind or incapacity which will shield a person from punishment for crime, annul his contracts, or set aside his will. It would be interesting to trace the changing and complicated history of forensic insanity from its foundation in the Roman law to the present time. Such an effort will involve a critical examination of all the English and American cases where the subject has been judicially considered, and will not aid much in ascertaining the legal relations of insanity at this time. The radical changes that have taken place in the last century in regard to the criteria of capacity and respon...« less