Excerpt from Bulletin of the Ontario Hospitals for the Insane, Vol. 5: A Journal Devoted to the Interests of Psychiatry in Ontario; January, 1912 Sometimes a doctor is called upon to examine one alleged to be insane, in order that he may be committed or declared by the courts to be insane. The opinion of a medical man is practically worthless if given simply as an opinion. [the Court determines the question of insanity, and requires the medical witness to set out in his affidavit in full his reasons for his conclusions. Care should be taken to preserve and transmit all the conver sation (if any) and all other indicia from Which the practitioner has formed his judgment. Again, and this is the most frequent case, a medical man is called as a witness in court upon the question of insanity. He may be an ordinary, though skilled, witness to set out the facts of the condition of the person whose mental state is under investigation, or he may be an ex pert witness called simply to give an Opinion, or he may act in each capacity. A witness should always bear in mind that he is not the person who is to decide any question of fact; that is for the Court or the jury, as the case may be nor is 'he to decide any question of law, that is for the judge alone. The most commonly occurring occasions for such evi dence are (i) when the capacity of a testator to make a will is under investigation, and (2) when the question is whether one who has committed a violent act is te sponsible to the criminal law. In neither of these inquiries is the insanity of the party in itself of the slightest moment - hundreds of insane persons have made valid wills, and hundreds of insane persons have been executed. If people do not like that law, let them get it changed; but for the present that is the law. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.