Is crime a disease?—is a question that has often been pnt forward during the nineteenth century, and though is now generally recognized that hered-inging and surroundings are h of the world's crime, there are at the present day few [persons who would be bold enough to proclaim that criminal instincts are a disease in the same degree as mumps, measles and scarlet fever. Early last year Dr. Bernard Hollander, one of the foremost mental specialists of the day, announced a successful cure of mental derangement by _trephining. In a lecture before the Incorporated British Phrenological Society Dr. Hol-Lander stated that, in his own experience, fifty eases of injury of a particular locality of the brain were followed by serious mental depression and melan-cholla; one-half of these cases were subsequently operated upon, when the Patients regained their normal mental condit He showed that blows and falls on another region were followed by violent and homicidal mania; on another region by kleptomani 3 and that when the source of irritation was removed, the excited faculty was restored to normal acti He concluded by relating boy, aged sixteen, who was a liar, thief and bully. Yet this boy, after the removal of @ strip of bone from his skull was restored to perfect morality. An incision along the top of the head revealed traces of an old injury. Trepanning was successfully performed, and when the boy bad recovered he not only lost his bad propensities but showed higher moral feelings.
The publication of Dr. Hollander's lecture led, a few days later, to the appearance in Marylebone Police Court of & Mrs. Staples, who desired to find a doctor who would treat her son, who was similarly afflicted. The magistrate evidently had not read the lecture, for he was unable to help the distressed mother.
Dr. Hollander's experiment in certainly victory for phrenology, which, after steadily growing in popular favour for the first brit of last century, became discredited by the appearance of ignorant and uoeducated exponents who knew nothing of the science or of the functions of the brain.
It owes its origin to Dr. F. who, toa lunatic asylum at Vienna, led opportunities for study-jing the diseased brain and for observing the correspondence between the form of the head and the special delusions of each patient. He began to lecture on the subject in 1796. Opposition on the part of the authorities in Vienna led him to travel through Northern Europe, accompanied by one of his most distinguished pupils, Dr. Spurzhelm, The latter visited Great Britain, where he lectured for four years, and it was while at Edinburgh that he met George Combe, who, by a long course of observation and study, became the best English exponent of the science. Combe wasan unwilling convert, but Spurzheim succeeded in convincing him of the genuineness of his deductions..In spite of the opposition of the great mass of his countrymen, Combe succeeded in convincing such men as Sic James Clarke, Physician to the Queen; Sir James Forbes, Dr. William Gregory Physician of Hanwell Asylum, and Dr. Abernethy, Professor of Anatomy and Surgery to the College. of. Surgeons, among there, that phrenology was genuine science, The principal cause of the decline of phrenology has already been mentioned, but there were also other reasons, chief among which perhaps was its association with mesmerism and hypnotism, Religious bigotry also helped to. discredit the science and to bring it to the parlous state in which we find it the present day. George Combe visited
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.