influence of disease. The remaining part of the boy's history was given by Dr. Greenwood, Mrs. Harber, and two other witnesses, whose names I do not recollect. Ten or twelve days after the sale, the boy left his work, came home with his hands clasped behind his head and neck, and complained of pain in the back part of his head. He was sent to Dr. Greenwood, who then happened to be in the neighbourhood. Bleeding gave the boy relief, and the doctor sent him home without examining into the nature of his disease. About two weeks after this, the doctor, who lived at a distance of ten miles, was called on to attend him. Upon examination, he found that the boy was labouring under sub-acute inflammation of the posterior portion of the brain, attended with constant priapism. Some days after this, the boy was seized with a similar passion for fighting to that spoken of by Mrs. Harber. It differed from it, however, in violence and duration. He became excessively rude and troublesome among the other negroes, fighting every one who gave him the slightest provocation; whipped the women, and beat the young negroes cruelly. His owner, incensed at his conduct, punished him severely. His passion for fighting instead of being subdued by punishment, dethroned reason, took under its control the reins of the propensities, and drove furiously onward, until all were lost in an ungovernable desire to kill every person who came into his presence-without regard to age, colour, or sex. A desire to kill continued to be his ruling passion up to the hour of his death, which happened about ten weeks from the time first spoken of by Mrs. Harber. Dr. Greenwood informed me that at every visit which he made to the boy after he first discovered his disease to be inflammation of the brain, the boy was labouring under priapism. In a post-mortem examination, Dr. Greenwood found a quantity of water infused upon the brain, and a portion of the brain highly inflamed. The doctor used a drawing of Spurzheim's head, mapped off into phrenological divisions for the purpose of pointing out to me the parts affected. He pointed to Amativeness as being the most highly inflamed, next to Combativeness, and lastly to Destructiveness. Amativeness was the seat of the disease, as was evinced by the presence of the pain in that region of the brain, and by constant priapism. His passion for fighting appeared when Com. bativeness was invaded, and his desire to kill indicated that Destruc tiveness was also inflamed. This case at the same time furnishes undoubted evidence of the truth of phrenology, and sets forth the science as furnishing the best means of tracing the progress of mental disease. Respectfully, &c., Columbus, Miss, Sept. 1839. RICHARD EVANS ARTICLE V. MEDICAL JURISPRUDENCE OF INSANITY. BY A. DEAN, ESQ., ALBANY, N. Y. The value of science, to the great mass of mankind, is derived from the practical applications of which its truths are susceptible. The learner may acquire it for its own sake, and receive the rewards of his toil in the pleasures that await the action and the acquisitions of his intellect. But God has not rested the progress of the race upon the simple desire of the mind for knowledge. He has also bestowed strong incentives, the effect of which is to render truths, apparently the most abstruse, available for the most common purposes. He has not left the astronomer satisfied with comprehending the movements of the universe, and the machinery of the heavens, until he could bring that knowledge to earth, and give to human history an unfailing chronology, and open to industry and enterprise a path-way over the depths of the ocean. He has not left the investigator of that subtle, but powerful agent of nature, electricity, to repose in quiet upon a mere knowledge of its properties, until he could turn that knowledge to useful purposes, and protect, by a simple rod, from its destructive action, all the delights that centre in his home. The time has arrived when mind, equally with matter, presents its claims for consideration, not alone with the view of being studied in itself, but also in reference to its practical bearings. Among the most prominent of these is insanity, or mental alienation; including as well idiocy and imbecility, as the more active forms of mania. This subject is acquiring additional importance in proportion to the advance of civilisation. The disease is, with very few exceptions, wholly confined to civilised nations. The causes that possess the most efficiency in its production, are found the most active where man has made great advancement. Its prevalence, as well as that of all nervous diseases, in this country, is alarming. The proportion of insane in the United States has been set down as one in eight hundred. In some of the New England states, as one to two hundred and fifty. The entire number of the insane in the United States has been computed at fifty thousand. There are many causes of a moral nature that are peculiarly operative in the production of this disease in this country. The great freedom of thought and action allowed by law; the spirit of emulation and rivalry, so rife among our citizens; the ever acting and changing scene of our politics; and, perhaps, more than all other causes combined, that spirit of speculation that despises the ordinary means of VOL. II.-3 accumulating property-that contemns the regular salutary laws impressed by God upon the condition of things-that seeks to crowd the events of years into the brief space of moments, and perils often the slow accumulations of a life upon the hurried transactions of an hour, are some, among the moral causes, that here push the different faculties into an unnaturally excessive action-that destroy their harmony of movement, and leave, bereft of its own guidance, the mind of the hapless sufferer. These are causes that exist, and must continue to, in the very nature of our institutions. They are interwoven in the frame-work of all our leading and original plans of policy, and are as utterly inseparable from our habits of thought, of feeling, and of action, as is the dead stillness of intellectual and moral death from the iron grasp of unqualified despotism. The constant operation of these causes, followed by effects correspondingly extensive, loudly requires an examination into the nature and forms of mental alienation, with the view of applying to them sound and correct legal principles. It is a melancholy truth that, until recently, the subject of insanity, neither in its causes, nor its curatives, nor the variety of its forms, nor the legal principles applicable to them, does not seem to have been properly understood. It has been regarded more especially as a judgment of God; as beyond the reach of remedies; as an infliction that should rightfully exclude its subject from all the privileges of social intercourse, and all sympathy with human feelings. In courts of justice, the plea of insanity has met with a cold reception. It has been there regarded rather as an attempt to escape the merited results of crime, than as furnishing a true reason why its consequences should not be visited upon its perpetrator. Many, it is to be feared, have been the miserable victims who have been doomed to expiate on the scaffold the acts, not crimes, which the derangement of their faculties has occasioned. A brighter era for the insane, however, is fast opening. The last fifty years have probably done more for them than all the previous experience of the world put together. A new and more rational philosophy of mind has inspired more correct views in reference to its complex phenomena. It has been made a thing of observation as well as a creature of consciousness; and our knowledge of its different powers and capacities has been derived both from our feeling them in ourselves, and our perceiving their action in others. The funda mental error upon which all the old metaphysicians proceeded, of considering mind as a single general power, equally capable of efficient action in any direction, has been productive of innumerable mischiefs in metaphysics, in morals, in criminal legislation, in medical jurisprudence. Men rarely act right who reason wrong; and the erroneous judgments formed of mind and of men; the action of legislative bodies, in the protection of rights by the punishment of wrongs; the strong effort to embody the common sense of mankind in the correct application of sound legal principles to aberration of mind, have all been so tinctured with that radical error, as to give rise to injurious consequences in the action and progress of society and civilisation. Fortunately we have at last succeeded in discovering in the science of mind the elements of a system, definite in its proportions, understandable in its nature, harmonious in its results. The consequences attendant upon this discovery, render it of the first importance. Not the least amongst these are the new views men have been led to entertain in regard to insanity. Its varied forms of exhibition were anomalies for which the old metaphysical systems could never account. They were totally inadequate to explain the operations of mind in health, much more in disease. Whether the man thought and felt, or the idiot simply vegetated, or the maniac raved, were alike inexplicable upon those numerous metaphysical systems that substituted hypothesis for truth, consciousness for observation, and fancy for fact. No one can reasonably expect to comprehend derangement of mind without first understanding its healthy, normal action. At the foundation of every thing mental, whether healthy or diseased, we recognise this great truth-that the mind is not a single general power, possessing, originally, capacities every way equal; but is made up of a great number of independent powers and faculties, each being a power, or an instrument of thought or of feeling, possessing its own constitution, its own specific function, and being independent of every other, except as to its modes of operation, and certain mutual and reciprocal relations established between all. This truth is of vital importance in reference to mental aberration, and to the legal consequences attached to it. It follows, as a resulting consequence, that each faculty does not necessarily manifest itself simultaneously with the others; that each may rest or act singly, and, what is of vast importance to medical jurisprudence, that each may singly preserve its own proper state of health or derangement. With the view of understanding aright the divisions introduced into the forms of insanity, it is proper to remark that the entire mind, consisting of intellectual, sentimental, and impulsive powers, is primarily divided into two great departments, intellectual and affective or moral; the first including all the faculties that form ideas, and the second all those that feel emotions and furnish impulses. The intellectual department is divided into two; the first including those faculties that perceive, that furnish facts and premises; the second, into those that reflect and reason, that make inferences and arrive at conclusions. The affective or moral department has a similar division; the first including those faculties that impel, called the propensities; the second, those that experience emotions called the sentiments. Those included under the division of propensities are, 1, Alimentiveness, which gives the instinct of hunger and thirst; 2, Amativeness, producing physical love; 3, Combativeness, inspiring the desire to combat; 4, Destructiveness, impelling to destroy; 5, Secretiveness, giving birth to cunning and secrecy of movement; 6, Acquisitiveness, or the propensity to acquire; 7, Constructiveness, giving the desire to construct; 8, Imitation, producing the propensity to imitate. The principal of the sentiments are, Self-esteem, giving the senti ment of self; Attachment, or Adhesiveness, inspiring social friendly feelings; Approbativeness, which experiences pleasure on receiving the approval of others; Cautiousness, inspiring fear; Conscientiousness, or the sentiment of right and wrong; Benevolence, giving birth to the feeling of general philanthrophy; Veneration, producing the sentiment of reverence; Hope, which lights up the future with buoyant expectation; Wonder, which delights in the marvellous; Wit, originating the mirthful; and Ideality, producing the sentiment of the sublime and the beautiful. 'The intellectual faculties are as numerous as are the ultimate results, or simple definite elements afforded by external things on a careful and searching analysis, each faculty taking cognisance of each result. The faculty of Individuality, for example, takes cognisance of individual existences; that of Eventuality, of events; that of Causality, of the relation of cause and effect. There are certain modes of activity in which some or all the faculties have a common action. The intellectual faculties 1. Perceive. 2. Remember what they have perceived. 3. Conceive or imagine what they have remembered. The reflective powers possess judgment; and all the faculties in common possess Consciousness, which reveals to themselves their own operations. Mind, in its healthy state, may well claim for itself much attentive consideration. A human being is a spectacle sublime in contemplation. Tenanting a globe every way adapted to his wants; linked by his physical constitution to the animal tribes, whom he subjects to his |