Henry Baird Favill, AB, MD, LL.D., 1860-1916, a ... - University Library

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MEDICINE AND PUBLIC HEALTH 281
freaks and devices which they employ under some law to
us as yet unknown.
The public and the medical profession have got to be
educated upon this point until we have reached the limit
of our toleration of ignorant procedures which amount to
barbarity.
One of the most serious difficulties in this matter is the
legal aspect. Under our present method, the law undertakes
to define what is insane and what is not insane. There is
a certain justification for that. The abstract idea of personal
liberty and personal responsibility on the one hand,
and the concrete idea of personal property on the other,
combined, have made a reason why the social relations of
this subject are tied up in legal enactment. So far as those
considerations go, that will probably always have to be.
But may I remind you that essentially that has nothing to
do with the case?
No statute can define insanity. No court can adjudicate
the problems of insanity with any approach to completeness.
We have got to go far behind' the courts in reaching for the
foundation and root of this question of mental disease.
Unfortunatel^^ the intervention of the law in this matter
has led us into a series of brutalities which we shall have
hard work to eradicate.
Do you realize that the great majority of all those who
are committed to insane hospitals are committed by a legal
process, involving more or less painful court procedure?
That a large part of all insane have in the course of their
legal commitment passed through lockups, jails, or police
Think of the infinite cruelty of these processes as
stations ?
applied to those suffering, sensitive, bewildered, struggling
souls
The correction of this is not so difficult. It, however,
involves the next point that I want to call your attention
to,— the substitution of the idea of a hospital for the idea
of a lunatic asylum.