A

TREATISE

ON THE

MEDICAL JURISPRUDENCE

OF

INSANITY.

By I. RAY, M. D.

BOSTON:

CHARLES C. LITTLE AND JAMES BROWN.

M.DCCC.XXXVIII.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1838,

By CHARLES C. LITTLE AND JAMES BROWN,

m the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

PREFACE.

FEW, probably, whose attention has not been particularly directed to the subject, are aware, how far the condition of the law relative to insanity is behind the present state of our knowledge concerning that disease. While so much has been done, within a comparatively short period, to promote the comfort of the insane, and so much improvement has been effected in the methods of treating their disorder, as to have.deprived it of half its terrors, it is both a curious and a melancholy fact, that so little has been accomplished towards regulating their personal and social rights, by more correct and enlightened principles of jurisprudence. While nations are vying with one another in the excellence of their public establishments for the accommodation of this unfortunate class of our fellow-men, and physicians are every year publishing some instance of an unexampled proportion of cures, we remain perfectly satisfied with the wisdom of our predecessors in every thing relative to their legal relations. This, no doubt, is mainly the fault of medical men themselves, who have neglected to obtain for the results of their researches, that influence on the law of insanity, which they have exerted on its pathology and therapeutics. In general treatises on legal medicine, this branch of it has always received a share of attention; but