A. H. SIMONTON, ESQ., M. D.,
of Cincinnati, Ohio.

PROF. JOHN H. PACKARD,
of Philadelphia.
RICHARD B. KIMBALL, LL. D.,
of New York.

H. E. ALLISON, M. D.,
Supt. Matteawan State Hospital, N. Y.

MORITZ ELLINGER, ESQ. of New York.

ALBERT BACH, ESQ., Vice-President Medico-Legal Society, of N. Y. BETTINI DI MOISE, M. D., FRANK H. INGRAM, M. D.. of New York. of New York.

F. C. HOYT, M. D.,

Supt. Iowa State Hospital for Insane, Clarinda, Iowa.

R. HARVEY REED, M D.,

of Mansfield, Ohio.

PROF. S. GROVER BURNETT, A. E. REGENSBURGER, M. D., JAMES D. PLUNKET, M., D.

of Kansas City, Mo.

of San Francisco, Cal. Pres't State B'd Health, Nashville, Ten

MEDICO-LEGAL SOCIETY.*

ADDRESS OF THE RETIRING PRESIDENT, EX-JUDGE HENDERSON M. SOMERVILLE.

The recurrence of this anniversary festival of our Society crowns the beginning of a new year in our history.

The old year is gone with its buried memories, its successful achievements, on the one hand, and its disappointing failures, on the other. As we look back and listen, the faint echoes, as it were, of the midnight chimes of its Cathedral bells fall on our ears, sadly tolling the departure of the Old year and merrily ringing in the New. We extend the proverbial adieu to one and welcome to the other.

The occasion furnishes a suitable opportunity for your retiring President to make some brief allusion to the work of the Society during the past year. It is pleasing to report that some progress has been made in the study of forensic medicine, the advancement of which is our highest purpose.

No subject appeals to our compassion so much as the care and treatment of the insane. Babylon, in all her desolation, never presented a spectacle so awful as "a human mind in ruins." This department of psychological medicine has received especial attention at the hands of this Society. There are those among us who favor a more humane treatment of these unfortunate victims of disease. Time has been when insanity was regarded as a crime, and not a disThose who had lost their minds were held to be possessed of demoniacal spirits, or punished for witchcraft. They were put in chains and incarcerated in prisons. Often

ease.

*Delivered January 19, 1893.

they were carried to the scaffold and executed as convicted felons. A new school of medical superintendents, and other alienists, are rising up all over the world, who demand the abolition of mechanical restraining apparatus in the treatment of the insane. They have cast away the camesoles, bed-straps, and other cruel appliances for bodily restraint, and turn these victims of mental disease loose from their prison-cells, put them under the care of humane nurses, and treat them as sick persons, no longer as convicts.

The society has given this subject a most thorough discussion during the past year. A symposium of views has been held at two or three different meetings, in which the opinions of the most eminent specialists on both continents have been elicited. It is believed that this discussion has accomplished great good, and will prove the happy harbinger of a more enlightened and humane management of the insane hospitals of this country.

So, in like manner, we have not abated the agitation of the great question of the criminal responsibility of the insane. No juridical heresy was ever so absurd as the "right and wrong test of insanity," as it is called. Our insane hospitals all over America, as in England and Germany and France, are filled with persons confessedly insane who can distintinguish right from wrong, but who possess no power to adhere to the right and avoid the wrong. They have no more power to resist certain proclivities to crime than a falling stone to resist the force of gravitation, or the sparks to fly upward. They are nevertheless held culpably liable by the American and English courts for the prescibed penalties of crime, as if they were sane. Germany has wisely abolished this rule, which originated centuries ago, in ignorance of the true nature of the disease of insanity. France has followed her example, and, while the courts of England theoretically adhere to the old rule, the executive depart

ment of that government is to-day practically carrying out the modern doctrine that victims of brain-disease, who violate laws under the duress of some irresistible power which destroys their faculty of volition, are not to be held criminally culpable. This is the doctrine of the whole medical world who are intelligently informed on this subject. Some of the courts are acknowledging the truth of it, and others will attain to a judicial knowledge of it in course of time. One mission of our Society is to struggle for the establishment of this humane principle of medical jurisprudence so long as we feel a conviction of its truth.

Another step has been taken by the Medico-Legal Society in the interest of sience. During the past few months a Psychological Section has been established, under the especial direction of our present distinguished Secretary and former President, Clark Bell, Esq. One of its purposes will be to energize the investigation of hypnotism and hypnosis in their relation to crime-that peculiar psychological condition sometimes known as the "New Mesmerism," which has been illustrated during the past year by the trial in the courts of France of the famous Mlle. Bompard. That trial elicited the opinion of many of the most learned alienists in France, and excited the general attention of philosophic students throughout the world.

In the prosecution of our labors in these fields of medical jurisprudence we should be encouraged by the general progress which is everywhere being made in all departments of science. History tells us of the Dark Ages in Europe. We have lived for a half century in the age of Steam. To-day we are living in what may be pre-eminently called the age of Electricity. As electric lights are illuminating our cities, and making them almost as bright as the day, like so many suns created by the ingenuity of man, so the electric lights of knowledge are ever dispelling the darkness of human ignor

ance all over the civilized world by the universal diffusion of intelligence. A telegraph station to-day occupies the site of the Garden of Eden, where, sixty centuries ago, our first parents, apparelled in their rude garments of fig-leaves, and, neither toiling nor spinning, idly listened to the songs of the morning stars.

Archimedes once declared to Hiero, King of Sicily: "Give me a place on which to stand, and I will move the world!" The engineers and philosophers of science are every day discovering this standing place longed for by the old Greek, and they are, by their discoveries and discussions, moving the great world of thought. Astronomers are planting their observatories on the peaks of the loftiest mountains, and with their huge telescopes they are peering into the heavens as never before. They behold mountains of snow and glaciers of ice in Mars, with oceans and rivers. They have discovered a new satellite for Jupiter, and have become so familiar with comets as no longer to regard them, like our ancestors did, as divine harbingers of dread pestilence, famine, and war.

Whether man fell by his own folly from the station of the angels, or rose by his own energy from an animated protoplasm, there is no denial of the fact that he is every day becoming wiser. He is hourly growing in knowledge, and "knowledge," as said by Bacon, "is power." The superstitions of the past are being discarded. The crystallized errors of ignorance are being broken in pieces, and the world of science and of thought is made to speak with new voices of harmony, just as the statue of Memnon was said to have given forth musical sounds only when broken.

There is much, in all these things, to encourage us in our labors as students of forensic medicine. The sons of science are rapidly climbing the rugged heights of Parnassus, and they are stopping by the way-side only so long as necessary