Dr. Forbes Winslow the Famous English Alienist and His Interesting Work.
Dr. Forbes Winslow, the distinguished London specialist on nervous and mental disorders, recently came to this country to attend the medico-legal congress held in New York. He presided over the department of insanity and mental medicine and read a paper on "Suicide as an Epidemic." During his stay here, Dr. Winslow is making an investigation of the workings of our public institutions for the treatment and confinement of the insane, which he declares are much in advance of those in England.
Dr. Winslow is the founder and head of the British Hospital for Mental Diseases and is also attached to the leading hospitals of London as a specialist on insanity amd mental and nervous disorders. He is the editor of the Psychological Journal, one of the leading publications of its class in London. Dr. Winslow has given special attention during his professional life to the criminal responsibility of the insane. In this direction he has followed the footsteps of his distinguished father, who was likewise a specialist on insanity and was the first physician in Great Britain to make the courts recognize the plea of insanity. Prior to 1844 it had never been considered by the English courts, and no matter in what mental condition a criminal was if found guilty of murder he was executed.
In that year, during the trial of the McNaughton case, which is well known in English criminal jurisprudence, the elder Dr. Winslow was called as an expert witness on the point of the prisoner's alledged insanity. It was conclusively proved that McNaughton was insane, and since then the plea of insanity has been considered in the highest courts.
Dr. Winslow has been an expert witness in an enormous number of criminal cases, and there has scarcely been a prominent murder trial in England in the last 20 years in which he has not been called upon to give his opinion as to the sanity of the accused. He professes not only to have fathomed the motive of the horrible Whitechapel murders, but to have run the notorious and fiendish "Jack the Ripper" to earth and placed him safely under lock and key. He is now incarcerated in an insane asylum in England. This fact, he says, is known to the authorities, but they have hushed up the case. Dr. Winslow declares that the man who committed the murders was a medical student suffering from religious monomania.
