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Is Legal Responsibility acquired by Educated Imbeciles?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2018

G. E. Shuttleworth
G. E. Shuttleworth*
Affiliation:
Royal Albert Asylum, Lancaster
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Extract

The question of the legal responsibility of the insane has been frequently under discussion both by legal and medical writers; and its conditions and limits must, I fear, still be regarded as far from settled; divergent views being held, perhaps naturally, according to the standpoint respectively taken up by the lawyer and the physician. “A lawyer, when speaking of insanity,” says Sir J. F. Stephen, “means conduct of a certain character; a physician means a certain disease, one of the effects of which is to produce such conduct.” It is somewhat remarkable that the legal responsibility of the idiot, and of his milder congener, the imbecile, has hitherto hardly been deemed worthy of discussion; but a recent law case, in which several patients under my care were concerned, has led me to think that a few remarks on the subject may not be altogether uninteresting or unprofitable.

Type
Part I.—Original Articles
Information
Journal of Mental Science , Volume 29 , Issue 128 , January 1884 , pp. 467 - 474
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1884

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Footnotes

∗

Throughout this paper the term imbecile is used to denote a person suffering from mental deficiency, either congenital or supervening in infancy, the degree of such deficiency being less than that denoted by the term idiocy.

References

† “Coke upon Littelton,” 247A.Google Scholar

* “Medical Jurisprndence,” Paris and Fonblanque (London, 1823), Vol. i., p. 290.Google Scholar

† “Archbold, C. P.,” p. 288.Google Scholar

* “Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity,” p. 305.Google Scholar

* Stephen's “Hist. of Crim. Law,” Vol. ii., p. 166.Google Scholar

* It may perhaps be well to add that the unfortunate subject of the judicial investigations above referred to was but little improved by education, so that his case hardly falls within the scope of the concluding remarks.Google Scholar

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