might see in the different wards Sundanese, Javanese, Chinese, Hindoos, various Europeans, and peoples from other countries, with widely varying features, yet the "cachet," so to speak, of the mental disease could in many cases be recognized at a glance. Had the laws of heredity, even, been earlier understood it would have been seen that mental derangements, like physical diseases and tendencies, were transmitted.
If insanity was formerly considered the evidence of satanic possession, how much more reason was there to believe that delinquencies of a criminal nature were the result of satanic instigation. While demoniacal possession, as an explanation of insanity, is discredited on all hands,[1] criminal acts are still looked upon as the instigation of the devil. It may be safely asserted that to-day the vast majority of mankind fully believe that an external influence for evil is at war in the individual with an external influence for good.
Atrocious crimes are especially referred to as the result of diabolical suggestion; and the same procedures, though in a milder form, which obtained in former times for the treatment of the insane are in full force to-day in the treatment of the criminal. In the one case, however, torture was used to drive the devil out, in the other the victim is punished for yielding to the devil's persuasion. The criminal is imprisoned, chained, immured in a dark cell, forced to severest labor, and in many prisons abroad subject to physical torture. Under some governments he is transported to torrid climates and compelled to work under a broiling sun, or, hidden from the sun altogether, to delve in mines. This much for the punishment. Similar methods are resorted to in attempting reform, as were formerly used in exorcising the devil from the maniac. The minister and priest, having at all times free access, exhort and pray for the criminal, that he may have strength to resist the evil spirit, and if some sudden revulsion of feelings animates him to struggle against his criminal impulses, as many an insane man succeeds in controlling his maniacal impulses, then it is believed that a new spirit has shed its beneficent influence upon him, or, in other words, the evil spirit has been exorcised. Those who strenuously protest against such an interpretation of sin and crime are branded with obnoxious names. Dr. White says that perhaps nothing did so much to fasten the term "atheist" upon the medical profession as the suspicion that it did not fully acknowledge diabolic interference in mental disease.
- ↑ This holds good for the present time, but a firm belief in the existence of demoniacal possession in past times is still held by the Church, as lately witnessed in the discussions between Huxley and Gladstone, Dr. Wace, and others, regarding the Gadarene pigs.
