ychoses of
criminals will be easier of solution.

REFERENCES

[1] WILMANNS: "Ueber Gefaengnispsychosen." Halle a. S., 1908.

[2] BONHOEFFER: "Klinische Beitraege zur Lehre von den
Degenerationspsychosen." Halle a. S., 1907.

[3] BIRNBAUM: "Zur Frage der psychogenen Krankheitsformen."
_Zeitschr. f. d. ges. Neurolog. u. Psych._ 1910.

[4] SIEFERT: "Ueber die Geistesstoerungen der Strafhaft." Halle a.
S., 1907.

[5] STRANSKY: "Ueber die Dementia Praecox, Streifzuege durch Klinik und
Psychopathologie." Wiesbaden, 1909.

CHAPTER III

THE FORENSIC PHASE OF LITIGIOUS PARANOIA

Maudsley[1] has long ago said: "It would certainly be vastly convenient
and would save a world of trouble if it were possible to draw a hard and
fast line and to declare that all persons who were on one side of it
must be sane and all persons who were on the other side of it must be
insane. But a very little consideration will show how vain it is to
attempt to make such a division. That nature makes no leaps, but passes
from one complexion to its opposite by a gradation so gentle that one
shades imperceptibly into another and no one can fix positively the
point of transition, is a sufficiently trite observation. Nowhere is
this more true than in respect of sanity and insanity; it is
unavoidable, therefore, that doubts, disputes and perplexities should
arise in dealing with particular cases."

No small amount of the disrepute into which expert medical testimony has
fallen is due precisely to a failure on the part of the legal profession
to appreciate these truisms. To the legal mind the transition from
mental well-being to mental disease is exemplified by that wholly
artificial, and to the psychiatrist's mind, subsidiary question of legal
certification. The law takes no cognizance of the conditions
necessitating this change; it only concerns itself with the delimiting
frontier, viz.:--certification. Legally, the insane has become such
through the filling out and signing of certain papers and through having
submitted himself to a certain prescribed legal procedure. The
physician, on the other hand, because of his peculiar relationship to
the patient, and as a result of his particular training, looks upon this
legal procedure as a necessary evil and merely as typifying the
conventional mode by which society settles its accounts with its
diseased members. Our legal brethren fail to appreciate, furthermore,
the fact that an individual