lves upon
it occupy themselves with a study of the personality of the paranoiac
rather than with the disease picture as such. Some of the investigators
have gone so far as to maintain that paranoia is not a disease at all
in the sense that typhoid fever is a disease or pneumonia is a disease,
but that the paranoiac picture is rather the expression of an anomalous
individuality and, as one author puts it, it is the evolution of a
crooked stick. Sander[5] recognized this when he so admirably stated
that the abnormal condition develops and unfolds itself in the same way
that the normal mind unfolds itself in the normal individual.

The cases herein reported have been under my observation now for several
years at the Government Hospital for the Insane, and I am indebted for
permission to report them to Dr. William A. White, Superintendent of the
Hospital.

CASE I is a white man, aged 64 on his first admission to the
Government Hospital for the Insane, July 9, 1907. This commitment was
the direct outcome of a trial for perjury which took place in May,
1906, in the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, at which the
patient was found guilty. While awaiting sentence he was adjudged
insane and sent to this Hospital. The evidence was gathered from the
Reports of the Maryland Court of Appeals, dating as far back as 1874,
and forms only an incomplete account of the patient's legal
activities, inasmuch as many of his law transactions never reached the
higher courts and consequently are not reported. In setting aside
1,296 magistrate's judgments obtained by the patient and amounting in
the aggregate to $127,836 debt and $2,348 costs, the Court states,
among other things, as follows:--

"The gross iniquity of this whole transaction, manifest enough upon
its face, is abundantly so by proof. The inference is irresistible
that the magistrate who issued these judgments merely wrote them out
on his docket without summoning witnesses and without the semblance
even of an _ex parte_ trial."

It was further brought out at the perjury trial in 1906 that in 1877
the patient had obtained 619 judgments against the A. E. Company,
aggregating approximately $50,000. These were likewise set aside by
the higher Court. We thus see that as far back as 1874 this king of
litigants had already had set aside by the higher Courts as many as
some 1,900 distinct and separate judgments. How many more of th