For, when it is borne in mind and made fully known to judges and juries that, in moral insanity and monomania, there is generally a morbid derangement of the whole mind, occasioning a perversion of the whole conduct and moral character of the individual, the cases of punishment in criminals who have shewn symptoms of mental disease, will probably be reduced to a very small proportion.589 It seems, then, to have been the prevalent judgement both of medical and legal writers in this country, that delusionconstitutes the essential character of insanity, and hence, unless the existence of this characteristic phenomenon should be proved, it would probably be very difficult to maintain a plea on the ground of insanity in this country, with a view to the removing culpability in a criminal accusation.588 With the earnest desire of death, there is combined an impression of the criminality of suicide; but this, instead of correcting the hallucination, only leads to another and most extraordinary mode of effecting the purpose; namely, by committing murder, and so dying by the hand of justice. Several instances are on record in which this remarkable mental process was distinctly traced and avowed; and in which there was no mixture of malice against the individuals who were murdered.On the contrary, they were generally children; and in one different realities and reactions In Britain this type of crime was not recognised as a special type of crime and seems to be somewhat unexplored by historical research, but they have existed at least in England. In 1851 Alexandre Brierre de Boismont wrote that a few decades earlier several of the patients at the hospital Bedlam near London had committed murder in order to be executed.587 The question of insanity among criminals naturally interested some physicians. James Cowles Prichard in an article inThe cyclopædia of practical medicine in 1835 concluded: Two years later Alexander Watson inA medico-legal treatise on homicide by external violencecontinued the argument against the prevalent legal ideas: Without referring to any specific case the physician Abercrombie in his bookInquiries concerning the intellectual powers and the investigation of truth, first published in 1830, as a form of melancholia gave a description that very closely fits the traditional understanding of a specific crime: 587 Brierre de Boismont 1851 p 646. 588 Prichard 1835 p 49, see also Prichard 1842 p 16. 589 Watson 1837 p 327. 168
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