A CURIOUS LUNACY CASE. Action Against a Popular Physician. (From Our London Correspondent.)

Te Aroha News, Volume III, Issue 122, 3 October 1885, Page 3

A CURIOUS LUNACY CASE. Action Against a Popular Physician. (From Our London Correspondent.)

London, August 7. That a person— a woman more especially —may be a pitiable monomaniac, committing the wildest absurdities, exciting public derision, and bringing obloquy on her name and family, and yet be perfectly sane in the eyes of the law, haB of late been abundantly made manifest. Mrs Weldori's was the first case that evidenced this surprising truth. Her friends, their patience worn out by freaks as discreditable as they were inexplicable, at last locked^ the woman up in Dr. Window's asylum, hoping that judicious treatment would calm her distempered fancy and make her more amenable to common sense. AlaB ! they little knew with whom they had to deal. Mrs Weldon's madness has a fatal amount of method in it. A perfect demon sub rosa, she in public presents the appearance of a somewhat eccentric woman of the world — cool, fluent, and ready of repa*te«. When in course of time poor Dr. Wiaslow was put on his trial for depriving an injured angel of her liberty he literally, didn't stand a chance. The jury simply poohpoohed the idea of the amiable plaintiff ever having been non compos mentis, and gave her, as you know, thumping damages by way of solatium. Since then a series of actions have been brought against medical men by persons incarcerated temporarily in lunatic asylums by their friends. Suing the doctors who sign the certificate is, of course, the most natisfactory mode of reprisal for persons really so injured. When successful, such actions not merely effectually and finally demonstrate the plaintiff's sanity, but ruin the doctors who have doubted it. Occasionally, though, a case crops up like that of Neave v. Hatherly, tried last week at the new Law Courts, in which the jury, whilst pronouncing their belief in the plaintiff's sanity, find ample excuse for the medical men who doubted it. The particulars of Neave y. Hatherly are well worth recording :— Miss Neave, says a summary of the case in the "Sunday Observer," was a lady of middle age, who, in 1881, resided with her mother in St. George's Road, Pimlico. Her brother, a Captain in the Army, home from service in India, and his child, were temporarily residing with them. On the 14th July she was by her mother's direction, and on the certificate of two doctors, taken off to a lunatic asylum, force being used to remove her. There she resided seven weeks, at the end of which time she was liberated, mainly, it would seem, on the motion of the keeper of the establishment, who considered thather iurther detention would not conduce to her improvement. The case for the plaintiff was that she was at all times pertectly aane, and that the medical men who gave the certificates did so without taking proper means to ascertain the facts, and were, in short, guilty of the mostreckleBB and culpable negligence. To that negligence, if it existed, her imprisonment during those seven weeks was, no doubt, due, and she accordingly claimed from them a solatium of £2,000 The action was brought in the first instance against both the medical men engaged, but one of them died before the trial, and it was continued against the survivor, Dr. Hatherly, who was the medical attendant of the lady's mother. That the lady was a lunatic in the ordinary sense of the word, that is to say, uniformly irrational in speech and act, was not for one moment pretended on the part of the defence, while the plaintiffs counsel were embarrassed by the fact that her eccentricity, if that be the right word for it,- was of a most abnormal character. On the one hand, she seems to have been perfectly competent to manage her own domestic and pecuniary affairs; while, on the other, she was dominated by certain fixed ideas that gave to her conduct, in certain relations, a wholly irrational aspect. The lady, as the AttorneyGeneral put it, held Low Church views. She attended the Conferences at Mildmay Park, and she was possessed with the idea that the canker of the world was the Society of Jesus. The members of the famous body, which Lovola founded, have had assailants of various degrees of intellectual eminence, from Pascal to M. Paul Bert, and so on down to Miss Neave, and of course detestation of their practices, whether emanating from Port Royal or the St George's Road, is not of itself evidence of any want of sanity. Miss Neave, however, found the trail of the serpent over everything. When her mother's servants misbehaved they were recognised thereby to be acting under Jesuit influence. When one of them had a hoarse voice Miss Neave thought that she was an agent of the Society, hiding the soutane under the petticoat of a nursery maid ; and in crossexamination she went so far as to state that the Fenians belonged to the Jesuit body, and assured Mr Charles Russell that she was in a position to prove it. Miss Neaves opinion of the universality of Jesuit influence led her, in fact, not only to see this danger on every side, but to take active steps to counteract it ; and with this in itself praiseworthy object, she was led to make nocturnal inspectionsunder the beds of the servants, and to insist on being admitted to her mother's room at three in the morning, that she might instantly formulate her complaints. On her mother's refusal to admit her, she threatened tounravejastockingthat her mother had been knitting during the day, and that lady proving obstinate, she was as good as her word, and performed this singular function of Penelorje in the small hours of the morning. She further accused the doctor of softening her mother's brain by administering the mild stimulant of sulphuric ether, a proceeding which she seems to have thought natural in a member of the medical profession, for " Jesuits," she said, "go about in all Borts of disguises, particularly as doctors." The nurse, whose manly voice had excited the suspicions to which we have before referred, was in like manner accused of drugging her brother's child, and all the servants seem from time to time to have been involved in the general condemnation. It was, as the Lord Chief Justice rather unkindly remarked, a very lively household, or as the cook, displaying a fine "note of repression" which Mr Matthew Arnold would have applauded, negatively put it, it was " a perfect heaven upon earth when Miss Neave was away." This being the state of affairs, the lady's mother consulted Dr. Hatherly as to the wisdom of temporarily secluding Miss Neave in an asylum. He had seen her several times, though not professionally, and after a short interview concluded that such a step was calculated to do her good. He subsequently had a second examination^ in compliance with the statute, and, after interrogating her, signed the certificate) believing, as- he asserted, that there was really no reason whatever to doubt the genuineness of his belief that she was a person of unsound mind proper to be detained and taken charge of for the purposes of treatment. Two questions were left to the jury. The first was whether the plaintiff was of unsound mind, fit to be detained in any asylum ; and the second, whether the defendant was guilty of oulpable negligence in making his certificate; and to both of these queries they returned a negative answer.

They found in effect that the plaintiff/ notwithstanding/ her eccentricities/ was/ sane, and ought not to have been sent to an asylum, and that the doctor, notwithstandng that his conclusion was wrong, came to the conclusion honestly, after having taken proper care in investigating the case.