∗ Criminal Lunatics; a Letter to the Chairman of the Commissioners in Lunacy, by Hood, W. Charles, M.D., Physician to Bethlehem Hospital. Churchill, 1860.Google Scholar

∗ I copy the following remarks bearing on this point from Dr. Henry Munro's Remarks on Insanity, (London, 1850.) “That form of the disease called instinctive madness is neither so common nor so distinctly marked as intellectual insanity; that there are such forms as these where the intellect is clear, but the impulse to some unnatural or rather outrageous acts is violent, there can be little doubt; and that these are not the ordinary results of the evil principle residing within us, but require the supposition of morbid action in the sensorium, is equally clear; on no other supposition can we account for persons imploring others to keep out of their way for fear they should kill or otherwise injure them; an act which they feel impelled to irresistibly, though their reason and moral sense convince them of the horror of the deed. Again, of the existence of that form called moral insanity, where the moral sense is unaccountably and suddenly changed, while the judgment remains pretty clear, there can be no doubt, though I believe that this form is much more mixed up with intellectual deficiency than is generally acknowledged in the present day. … I refrain from dwelling much on these forms from a sense that it is most difficult, and replete with danger both socially as well as religiously, to decide where actual physical disease of such an amount as to incapacitate the mind from its proper action steps in; for nothing can have the cover of disease except that condition which is really beyond the control of the will; and the distance between what a person evilly disposed (as we all are by nature) imagines to be the boundary over which he really could use control if his whole will were bent to the effort, is immense; and thus, while I feel it to be necessary to think that some are really the victims of a disease which they cannot resist, and would endeavour to shield them from punishment which otherwise they would deserve, I should fear very much to extend this shelter further than the real facts of the case would require.”Google Scholar