ABSTRACT
The analogy with physical disease on the basis of which madness is conceived as a medical condition invites a series of false and misleading beliefs. Organic disorders are those conditions whose physical cause is known to medicine – brain tumour, head injuries, toxic reactions and ‘brain diseases’ such as the arteriosclerotic cerebral degeneration known as senility. Understanding madness as a disease may engender mercy in our response to the criminal sufferer of that condition. Consider the different ways in which mercy and justice might influence what is, distributively speaking, the same judgment, in a case from criminal justice like the one quoted. Influenced by the writing of Isaac Ray whose important Treatise on the Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity put forward an analysis of madness as brain disease, the court’s Justice Doe proposed that being an ‘offspring or product of mental disease’ should be the criterion for criminal insanity.
