- tion, but we contend, that a person acting under the
influence of bodily suffering is very apt to fall into numerous fallacies respecting the transactions in which he may have been previously engaged; especially in such cases as usually constitute the objects of medico-judicial inquiry, where the passions not unfrequently increase the natural disturbance of the mind, while the eagerness which is so justly felt for the detection of the author of the injury, will tend rather to heighten than to correct any hallucinations under which the sufferer may happen to labour; for on such occasions the imagination is always ready to supply the want of testimony, and to fill up the spaces which actual observation may have left vacant.
Patients have not unfrequently laboured under the impression of their having taken poison, when there can never have existed the least ground for such a suspicion, and yet their general conduct has been in complete opposition to the idea of insanity:[1] a curious case of this kind is related in the Sepulchretum of Bonetus; and even during the progress of the present work, the author was consulted upon an illness, which the patient seriously attributed to the operation of a slow poison, declaring that it had been secretly administered during a philanthropic visit to one of our public prisons. Dr. Esquirol[2] also relates the case of a lady, twenty-seven years of age, who in the last stage of phthisis pulmonalis perceived in her room the odour of burning charcoal, and immediately conceived that there was a design against her life; in consequence of which she left her lodging, and sought another abode, but the fumes
