Was Guiteau sane and responsible for the assassination of President Garfield? / by Theodore W. Fisher.

  • Fisher, Theodore W. (Theodore Willis), 1837-1914.
Date:
1882
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Was Guiteau sane and responsible for the assassination of President Garfield? / by Theodore W. Fisher. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    purposes. He says, in substance, that insanity is a prolonged departure, without adequate external cause, from the ways of thinking and states of feeling, and he might have added manner of acting, usual to the individual in health. Here the physical cause is as- sumed to exist in the absence of adequate external causes, and it is not necessary to prove its existence for the purposes of the definition. In how many of our patients do we find physical symptoms that would suggest, much less prove, insanity in the absence of mental manifestations? The absence of decided phys- ical symptoms may indicate a chronic stage or a calm interval of insanity, and should have little weight in discussing Guiteau’s mental condition. I do not propose to rehearse the evidence in the case of Guiteau, as that has been so fully done by Dr. Fol- som and Dr. Chauning in recent articles, but merely to recall such parts of it as may be convenient for my purpose. The experts who assert Guiteau’s insanity all agree that he has been insane most of his life. The whole aspect of the case and the condition of the pris- oner s'uggest chronicity. Dr. Kiernan was quite de- cidedly of the opinion that it was a case of primare verriXcktheit or the primary insanity of the Germans, a disease of congenital origin, developing pari passu with the mental unfolding of the child, and usually due to hereditary influences. The terms moral imbecility and folie raisonante are, I believe, nearly synonymoifs with this form. These and other forms, as the “ im- becility in the first degree ” of Ray, chronic mania with religious delusions, chronic subacute mania with exacerbations of excitement at long intervals, and, finally, megalomania and general paresis, were all care- fully discussed by the experts for the defense. The inception of Guiteau’s insanity was placed by some at the age of eighteen, when a student at Ann Arbor, Michigan, and with much probability. The evidence is meagre, but it all tends to show a boy of ordinarily good disposition, and intellectually