Then, it not unfrequently happens that after the trial the thing is done which should have been done previously; experts in insanity are employed to decide upon the prisoner's state of mind. The court should call such experts to their assistance at the trial, and, what is most important, ample time should be allowed to examine the suspected lunatic. In France the "Juge d'instruction" requests neutral experts to examine and report upon the accused, and I have recently been assured by physicians in Paris, with whom I have discussed this point, that the plan, on the whole, works well. Is it too much to hope that common sense will guide our own law-makers to introduce a similar practice?[212]
During the meeting of the International Medical Congress, 1881, a party of distinguished men from other lands visited Broadmoor, including MM. Foville and Motet, Professors Hitchcock, Ball, Tamburini, Dr. Müller, and Dr. Whitmer. We shall always remember the day with pleasure. One result was an interesting narrative of the visit by M. Motet of Paris. We met at "Waterloo," and it was gratifying to think of the different feelings under which representatives of the French and English assembled, from those experienced on the battle-field to which the station owes its name.
Footnotes:
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[210] Dr. William Orange.
[211] Journal of the Statistical Society, vol. xxxviii. (Guy). [Appendix K II.]
[212] For detailed account of the French law, which in some particulars may require greater safeguards, see article by the author, "Mental Experts and Criminal Responsibility," Journal of Mental Science, edited by Dr. D. Hack Tuke and Dr. George H. Savage, April, 1882. For more information respecting criminal lunatics, see [Appendix L].
CHAPTER VII.
OUR CHANCERY LUNATICS.
Of the relations of lunatics to that Court which Dickens describes as having its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, its worn-out lunatic in every mad-house, and its dead in every churchyard, we must briefly speak, and in many respects speak favourably. It may have been true that "the Court of Chancery gives to moneyed might the means abundantly of wearying out the right; so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope; so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart; that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give—who does not often give—the warning, 'Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than come here!'" But whatever this "most pestilent of hoary sinners" may have been in the past, it has, through its Lord Chancellor's Visitors, performed its duty towards its "worn-out lunatics," not only "in every mad-house," but in many a home in which they enjoy as much liberty as possible, while the property of which they are incompetent to take charge, is carefully administered by the Lord Chancellor. In his Address at the eighth section of the International Congress, Dr. Lockhart Robertson pointed out that 34.6 per cent. of the Chancery lunatics are treated in private dwellings. Hence 65.4 per cent. are in asylums—a striking contrast to 94 per cent. of private patients in asylums under the Lunacy Commissioners. Dr. Robertson concludes that some 30 per cent. of these are, therefore, in asylums needlessly, and hence wrongly. The fact is important, and will attract, it is to be hoped, more attention than hitherto, although I can hardly see that it follows that all these patients referred to are "wrongly confined," or would be better elsewhere. I would, however, reiterate what has been insisted upon in a former chapter, that, essential as asylums are, a large number of patients may be comfortably placed under other and less restrictive conditions.