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EDWARD D. WORRELL. 141

How admirably does the author’s description of feigned
epilepsy apply to the case of the prisoner at the bar. Has a
single instance of personal injury been sustained in any of
the attacka mentioned? Why is it that Dr. Bassett, who was
physician to the jail, five months after defendant was confined
there, and who saw him daily and attended him in a slight
attack of intermittent fever, never discovered any symptoms
of epilepsy? And yet as soon as Dr. Bassett ceased to attend.
the jail, he had one hundred fits in rapid succession, witnessed
by no person but hia mother. There is no evidence that the
jailer, or any other person whose duty it is to take charge of
the prisoner, ever saw him in one of these convulsions.

‘He served a considerable time in the army, and no person
there ever zaw him in one of them, and both Mr. Raisin and
Mr. Ringold say in their depositions that they never heard
of his having fits. Is it not then fair to infer that his is a
ease of simulated epilepsy, resorted to on some occasions to
conceal hia dissipated habits from his parenta, and in the
jail to furnish his mother with an apology for committing a
high crime, and to lay a foundation for this defense?

But suppose for the sake of the argument we admit that
the five instances referred to in the testimony were cases of
real epilepsy, what conclusion is to be drawn from that fact.
It is conceded by all writera on medical jurisprudence that
the natural tendency of the disease is to produce imbecility
and fatuity, and it requires many years with attacks at short
intervals even to produce this result,

Dr. Bassett and Dr. Bannister, both of whom stand high
in their profession, say ‘‘that to produce imbecility the com-
plaint must be of long standing and the intervals between the
attacks very short.”” Dr. Bannister for several years has
been physician to the City Hospital of St. Louis, where luna-
ties are occasionally treated; he was also for one year an at-
tending physician in the Philadelphia Hospital, where they
had upon an average one hundred and eighty insane persons
under treatment; yet, he never knew a case of insanity to
result from epilepsy, though he informs you that it is stated
in the books that it sometimes terminates in that way. He

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