Medical Profession holds in its hands the learning and the experience of this subject, on the other the members of it often find themselves in a very unenviable position while informing Courts of Justice by their evidence. I believe, indeed, that I shall obtain the assent of experienced Practitioners, when I affirm, that, in a large number of instances, it is difficult to certify that a patient requires coercion or surveillance, without incurring the risk, that he may be returned into the hands of his family, before the conditions of his recovery are completed, under a different opinion entertained by the officers whose duty it is, and who conscientiously perform that duty, to visit the receptacles of such patients.
Before I enter upon the topics from which, and the means by which, we are enabled to prove or to disprove an abnormal state of mind, (I use this term as involving no hypothesis) it appears expedient carefully to weigh the terms -drawn, indeed, from our own vocabulary, but prescribed by the Legislature-expressing the abnormal states of mind for which the Medical