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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1839 Excerpt: ... meditation; and accordingly she was sentenced to hard labour for life. 156. Sometimes, the individual confesses a motive for the homicidal act which is rational and well founded, but altogether inadequate to lead to such an action, in a sound mind. There are seldom wanting other circumstances in the previous conduct, conversation, or bodily health, to confirm and establish beyond a reasonable doubt the presence of insanity, the suspicion of which is thus excited. All doubt of the correctness of this conclusion is removed in the first of the following cases, which is introduced to illustrate this form of the disorder, by the pathological changes discovered after death, and in the second by the previous existence of insanity. 157. At Rouen, in 1820, a young man named Trestel, seventeen or eighteen years old, whose family was respectable and in easy circumstances, obtained an almost complete meeting of its various members to the number of thirteen, and endeavoured to poison them all by putting arsenic into the soup. The severe vomiting which it produced, however, was the means of saving all their lives. It appeared in evidence, that Trestel was so imbecile at fifteen years of age, that he was incapable of executing the slightest commissions; that he had strange and incoherent ideas; that he was sad, taciturn and incapable of being instructed; that he was in the habit of addressing letters to an imaginary female whom he was in love with. On the trial as well as on the previous examination, Trestel alleged as his motive for committing the crime, that his father had fre This verdict is very properly censured by Georget, who says, that if the accused was mad she ought to have been acquitted; and that if not mad she acted from premeditation, an...

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