_From an old-fashioned country doctor to an eminent alienist in New York
city:_
My dear Sir:
I cannot claim the honour of your acquaintance. My name is quite unknown
to you. For some thirty years I have been established in this little
town, ministering to a district which extends five miles in every
direction from my house-door. My practice, varying little from year to
year consists largely in prescribing liniments, quinine, camphorated
oil, and bicarbonate of soda; and regularly I am summoned, of course,
into the presence of the august mysteries of birth and death.
The life, though grateful, is laborious. The opportunities for keeping
in touch with the march of events in the great world outside are
limited. It has nevertheless been one of the few delights of my
restricted leisure to follow your career through the medium of the
public press. My own course, as I have shown, lies far from the highly
specialised and fascinating field of mental pathology to which you have
devoted yourself. But from the distance I have admired the expert skill
and the consummate authority which have made you the central figure in
an unbroken succession of brilliant criminal trials. I have admired and
kept silent. If I have departed from my custom in the present instance,
it is only because I feel that your brilliant services in the recent
Fletcher embezzlement case ought not, in justice to yourself and to our
common profession, to be passed over in silence.
Let me recall the principal circumstances of the Fletcher case. The man
Fletcher was indicted for appropriating the funds of the trust company
of which he was the head. His lawyer pleaded insanity and called upon
you to give an account of several examinations you had made of the
prisoner's mental condition. You testified that on one occasion you
asked the defendant how much two plus two is, and he replied four,
thereby revealing the extraordinary cunning with which the insane assume
the mask of sanity. You then asked him to enumerate the days of the week
in their proper order. This the prisoner did without the least
hesitation, thereby supplying a remarkable instance of the unnatural
lucidity and precision of thought which, in the case of those suffering
from progressive insanity, immediately precede a complete mental
eclipse.
On the other hand you found that the defendant was unable to recall the
name of the clergyman who had married him to his first wife at San
Jacinto, Texas, twenty-seven years ago; an unaccountable failure of
memory, which could not be passed over as an accident and must be
accepted as a symptom of the gravest nature. You cited the prisoner's
lavish expenditure on motor-cars and pearl necklaces as evidence of his
inability to recognise the value of money; and this in turn clearly
indicated a congenital incapacity to recognise values of any kind,
whether physical or moral. This contention you drove home by citing the
very terms of the indictment, in which it was charged that the prisoner
had failed to distinguish between what was his and what was not
his--another infallible sign of approaching mental deliquescence.
You did not stop with the man Fletcher. You searched his family history
and found (1) a great-uncle of the defendant who used to maintain that
Mrs. E. D. N. Southworth was a greater genius than George Eliot; (2) a
second cousin who dissipated a large fortune by reckless investments in
wild-cat mining shares; and (3) a nephew who was accustomed to begin his
dinner with the salad and finish with the soup.
At the trial, counsel for defence asked you a hypothetical question. It
contained between nine and ten thousand words arranged in two hundred
and fifty principal clauses, and nearly a thousand subordinate
adjective and adverbial clauses, with no less than eighty-three
parentheses and seven asterisks referring to as many elaborate
foot-notes. It would have taken a professional grammarian from three to
six days to grasp the proper sequence of the clauses. Yet it is on
record that within three seconds after the lawyer had finished his
question, and while he was still wiping the sweat from his forehead, you
answered "Yes." This is all the more curious because I gather from
statements in the press that while the question was being propounded to
you, you were apparently engaged in jesting with your fellow-experts or
nodding cheerfully to friends in different parts of the court-room.
Needless to say Fletcher was acquitted.
I have mentioned your fellow-experts. That recalls to my mind another
admirable phase of your services in behalf of the medical art. Your
activity in the criminal courts has freed our profession from the
ancient reproach that doctors can never agree. As a matter of fact,
whether you have been retained by the prosecution or the defence, I
cannot think of a single instance in which you have failed to agree with
every one of the half-dozen other experts on the same side. More than
that, I firmly believe that if by some unexpected intervention you were
suddenly transferred from the employ of the defence to that of the
prosecution, or _vice versa_, your opinion would still be in complete
harmony with that of every one of your new colleagues. In offering your
services impartially to the District Attorney or to counsel for the
defence you have lived up to that lofty impartiality of service which is
the glory of our art. The physician knows neither friend nor foe,
neither saint nor sinner. From the rich store of your expert knowledge
you can draw that with which to satisfy all men.
I find it hard to frame a single formula which shall describe the sum
total of your achievements in the field of medicine. Perhaps one might
say that you have discovered the unitary principle underlying the laws
of health and disease, for which men have searched since the beginning
of time. Behind all physical ills they have looked for Evil. Behind
diseases they have looked for Disease. That unitary principle you have
found in what goes by the general name of Insanity. The cynical opinion
of mankind long ago laid it down that all crimes may be resolved into
the single crime of allowing one's self to be found out. If a poor man
is caught, it is stupidity or negligence. But obviously, when a wealthy
criminal is apprehended, the only possible explanation is that he is
insane.
The youthful degenerate who resorts to murder; the financier who steals
the savings of the poor; the lobbyist who buys a Senator-ship and sells
a State; the Pittsburg millionaire who seeks to rise above the laws of
bigamy, may all be explained, and acquitted, in terms of mental
aberration. The only parallel in history that I can think of, is the
elder Mr. Weller's belief in the efficacy of an alibi as a defence in
trials for murder and for breach of promise of marriage.
I congratulate you, sir. You have discovered a principle which, like
charity, covers a multitude of sins. Like charity, too, your discovery
begins at home. For, as I have shown, there is no home in this broad
land wherein the expert will fail to discover the necessary great-aunt
or third cousin endowed with the precise degree of paranoia, paresis, or
infantile dementia required to secure an acquittal, or, at least, a
disagreement of the jury.
Sincerely yours,
AN ADMIRER.