D

IAGNOSIS in psychiatry (as the branch of medicine devoted to insanity is now called), like all questions in science, depends for its solution on relative, not absolute, tests. No mental state can be an evidence of insanity unless it results from an underlying morbid element. Morbid factors in insanity are always: pathoanatomic (erroneously called pathologic), biochemic (that is, destitute of macroscopic or microscopic pathoanatomic features; erroneously-as the secondary results show-called functional), and teratologic (due to defect or one-sided excess, or both, in cerebral structure and possibilities).

The confusing conception of the subject. thus cleared up, the following definition of insanity becomes possible:

Insanity is a morbid mental state arising from brain disease, disorder or defect which without adequate external cause perverts the mental relations of the individual to his surroundings or to what from his birth, education and circumstances must be assumed to be such surroundings.

Tests in science must be relative and must thereby exclude all alternative hypotheses. Twentieth-century culture sits very lightly over stone-age beliefs which

under

financial revolutions come to the surface as in Dowieism, Eddyism, spiritualism, clairvoyants, beliefs in witchcraft, and so

on.

Contrasted influence of environment and cerebral morbidity very vividly appeared in a brother and sister under my care. Both believed in fairies. The sister said (and justifiably) that the brother was insane, because his "fairies" did things no other "fairies" ever did. In other words, his "fairies," unlike hers, were not the product of education, but the hallucinatory delusions of a morbid mind.

The Important Elements of Insanity

It is not enough, therefore, that a strange belief exists; the why it exists is the important element in insanity diagnosis. Hallucinations, delusions, illusions, obsessions or imperative acts are of equal clinical significance in insanity as are temperature variation, stupid delirium, abdominal eruptions, diarrhea, and wasting in typhoid fever.

Hallucinations involve the special senses. A hallucination is a perception of an object as a real object, without the presence of the object to justify the perception. In this sense, hallucinations do not occur in

the sane. In the ordinary sense, omitting the phrase "as a real object," they do. The first implies belief in their actuality. The latter (unless there be failure to be logical or because of bad education) are merely subjective sensory perceptions the erroneous character of which is fully recognized.

An illusion is a perception of a real object in characters which it does not possess. A delusion is a firmly fixed baseless belief out of which the subject cannot be reasoned by logic adequate to his birth, environment, and education.

An obsession is a dominant idea unrelated to the patient's mentality from which he cannot rid himself.

Imperative acts are acts to which the victim is impelled despite their (to himself) evidently trivial, absurd or criminal nature.

Hallucinations

Hallucinations involve all the senses and may be followed or accompanied with false secondary sensations. Hearing a sound may produce vision of a color. The blind man who said scarlet was the sound of the trumpet expressed a false secondary sensation.

Hallucinations, unless they occur rapidly, induce certain acts. Auditory, visual, and gustatory hallucinations may lead to homicide or suicide. Olfactory hallucinations may cause the victim to commit arson, if it is disagreeable, or rape, if agreeable. The latter is due to the association of olfaction with the genitalia.

Olfaction as an Erotogenic Factor The pristine association of olfaction with volupty has continued as an erogenous zone, even though desire produced by olfactory association has been largely replaced in man by desire from visual association. The extent to which olfaction exerts an influence in this direction on man has, however, been much underestimated.

Thus Cloquet, who has called attention to the eroticism excited by flowers, states that Richelieu lived in an atmosphere laden with perfume as a stimulus to volupty. Laycock (a keen neurologist) found that in women love for musk and other perfumes

was related to volupty. According to Hildebrand, olfaction is remotely connected with sexuality. Flowers occasion pleasurable sensual feelings, which it is obvious did not escape Solomon's observation, as witness the Song of Solomon: "And my hands dropped with myrrh and my fingers with sweet-smelling myrrh upon the handles of the lock." According to Most, sensual young peasants excite chaste girls by carrying handkerchiefs in their axillæ while dancing and then wiping the perspiring faces of their partners with them.

Olfactory impressions in man under ordinary conditions do not, Krafft-Ebing claims, play quite as important a part as in animals. Binet, opposing this view of KrafftEbing, cites the case of a medical student seated on a bench in a public park, reading a book on pathology. Suddenly a violent erection disturbed him. He looked upa woman redolent with perfume had seated herself upon the bench. He could attribute the erection to nothing but the olfactory impression. The infrequency of these cases, however, tends to support Krafft-Ebing's view that under ordinary conditions sexual response to olfaction in man is feeble.

Under the emotional disorder produced by the upset of insanity, primitive states rise to the surface. Hence olfactory hallucinations are often associated with sexuality in insanity and necessarily with the religiosity which so frequently vicariates with sexuality. Arson is due to the natural desire to purify by fire. Nasal disorders, ozena, etc., sometimes form an illusional basis of olfactory hallucinations. These, however, would not occur unless a psychopathic etiologic moment was present.

The Three Classes of Delusions

Delusions are divisible into three classes: temporary, permanently fixed and unsystematized, and systematized. The last two occur in chronic types of insanity only.

Systematized delusions are delusions supported by details which appeal to sane people untrained in logic and dominated by the suspicional egotism of primitive man, and who, therefore, disobey the command, "Judge not lest you be judged," and who violate the law that everyone

must be presumed to be innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Systematized delusions are less apt to impress the populace and the charlatan as evidence of insanity than does the uncertainty born of fatigue in sane neurasthenics. Systematized delusions are often associated with hallucinations. Then, from their seemingly occult nature, they are often accepted as evidences of sanity by the "hardheaded" business men who patronize quacks, buy patent medicines, become Eddyists, Dowieites or consult mediums or clairvoyants on business matters. Persons of this type accept the systematizeddelusional lunatic or the quasi criminals mentioned as leaders, but decry sanitation or nonsurgical therapeutics as impractical. To them, the golden rule is the iridescent dream of a lunatic. Delusions constructed in the way described are evidences of insanity, but no belief born of environment, and logically acted upon from that environment, is such an evidence.

Obsessions occur in neurasthenia, but their morbid nature is then fully recognized by the victim, hence by themselves obscessions are not evidences of insanity. Imperative acts are evidences of insanity, since in them free determination of the will is involved.

What are often taken for obsessions, by untrained alienists made so by a professorship in a subsidized university, are morbid emotions.

The melancholiac has not a delusion or an obsession that he is sad, but sadness tinges his whole mental being. The emotionally buoyant patient is really so, but without physiopsychologic cause. The same is true of the pathetically emotional patient. The stuporous and dazed or confused patient has these states as a basis of his mental operations. Unlike obsession, these emotional states are the basis of, not foreign to, the mentality.

Acceptance by Sane People of Insane
Delusions

One test of a delusion usually employed is utterly valueless. The fact of its acceptance by sane people, the influence of the insane on crowds, as Ball remarks,

cannot be contested. The epidemics of religious insanity, of hysterical religion, and of demonolatry attest this too emphatically. Anent the mental state of crowds, Fournial remarks that a crowd may be considered as a being which feels and acts but does not reflect. This is the result of the unconscious but suggestive diffusion of an emotion. It is produced by imitation. Such a mental state predisposes to the reception of insane notions.

The question arises, How far can this influence of the insane on the sane extend? The English and American witchcraft epidemics show that entire communities may be affected thereby. The same is shown in the crusades, in the "dancing mania," and to a certain extent in the flagellants. The history of "fire" panics in crowded theaters illustrates the psychological principle involved in "transformed insanity."

The principle underlying the frequent testimony of the sane to the truth of the delusions of the insane appears in the remark of Savage that "extraordinary complications from the occurrence of combination or agreement of persons of unsound mind upon the same delusion."

Despite all dicta on the subject, the insane may, therefore, have accomplices and abettors; some sane, some insane. Freeman of Pocasset, Massachusetts, was a paranoiac, his wife was an ill-balanced woman; but aiding and abetting them were, as Folsom has shown, sane second-adventist fanatics. In Sandwich, Illinois, a sane father and his paranoiac son abetted an insane mother in what proved to be a fatal forty-day fast preparatory to the immaculate delivery of a new Christ. The paranoiac son gave inventively stupid "spiritual" reasons why a necropsy disproved the existence of pregnancy.

Ball has not put the case too strongly, however, when he says that the sane of mediocre mental caliber are much more apt to accept the delusions of the insane than their fellows. More than one lunatic recognized as insane by his fellow patients has been released as sane by a "sane" jury on the testimony of "sane experts," to demonstrate later his "sanity" by a brutal,

uncalled-for homicide. How far this influence of the insane on the sane extends has been shown in more than one revolution or religious sect.

Masaniello was, as Sir Walter Scott has shown, a paranoiac who became the head of the Neapolitan revolution. Rienzi, as Lombroso has proven, also was a paranoiac guilty, when a ruler of Rome after his successful revolution, of a thousand insane inconsistencies. The paranoiac Julia de Krudener was strongly potential in forming the "Holy Alliance." The paranoiac Louis Reil nearly shook off Canadian rule over the Indians of the Northwest.

John of Leyden, Muggleton, Naylor, and Johanna Southcotte were paranoiacs able to impose their delusions of divinity of prophetship or of divine maternity upon

numerous followers, and thus to establish religious sects. The pseudocyesis of Johanna Southcotte, which recalls that of the Illinois woman, was accepted as pregnancy with Christ, by numerous devotees, whose faith in this "pregnancy" endured, albeit it was "protracted" for years.

Religion and revolutions are sufficiently out of the common to be accepted as predisposing to insane delusions. In finance, however, the same story is told. Clouston had under his care a paranoiac who was able to impose his delusion, anent the "elixir of life," on sane people and sell them stock in the same while on parole from the insane hospital. That Patterson, the "Darien Schemer," was a paranoiac, Macaulay's account leaves no doubt. "Darien scheme" ruined half Scotland.

His

7

Political Life of the Nez Perces

TH

HE tribal political life and system of government of the Nez Percés Indians, before they came in contact with the whites, was a difficult matter to understand. It required years of association with the people, coupled with an intimate knowledge of Indian mental processes, to arrive at anything like a comprehension of the seemingly inconsistent phases that went to make up their form of government.

The Nez Percés Nation, at the time of which I speak, consisted of a number of allied tribes strung together in a sort of rude confederacy. In a great many things the several tribes were totally independent of and owed no fealty to the central government. In other, and seemingly less, important matters, they were bound to the central government and to each other by the strongest ties. Broadly speaking, matters that concerned each tribe only were adjusted by that tribe, while matters in

which the whole people might have an interest, no matter how remote, were considered by the nation as a whole.

The Chief of the Nation

The Nation was ruled by a hereditary chief, and by several subordinate, or subchiefs, as his aids and advisers. How the ruling line of our day acquired its title is a matter shrouded in mystery. So far as I have been able to ascertain, the family of which Chief Joseph was the last had ruled the nation as far back as their tradition extends. The monarchy was in a sense elective, but the mantle of authority fell, by common consent, upon the shoulders of the eldest son of the chief, at his death. The ceremony of election was purely a matter of form.

After the advent of Christian influence among the people, a very bright man, The Lawyer, set up his claims to leadership and was elected by his Christian brethren on the Kooskia to the position of chief,

but his authority was not recognized by any considerable portion of the tribe, though he continued through life to exert a great influence over his immediate people; and it must be admitted that this influence, judged by Christian standards, was always for good.

Contrary to the popular belief, the authority of the head chief was not sovereign. In fact, his voice in council was not more powerful than that of any other councilor. When he arose to speak, his words were heeded with the same degree of courtesy as those of any other member of the council, but each councilor felt perfectly free to dissent from his expressed opinion if the ideas of the chief did not strike him favorably. He could no more issue an arbitrary decree than can the President of the United States. In fact, our Chief Executive is vested with more despotic power than was ever a head chief of the Nez Percés. So far as I can recall now, only in matters of war the chief's power was absolute. When he assumed the leadership of his tribesmen in arms, then his power over their movements became paramount, then was he chief in fact as well as in name and no warrior dreamed of questioning his decree. It must be stated, however, that even under these conditions the head chief never took action without the advice and counsel of his subordinates. Joseph even went so far, in the Nez Percés War, as to halt long enough in his flight, to call a council to decide the question whether they should submit to the yoke of bondage, lay down their arms and return to the reservation, or continue their retreat and endeavor to reach a country where they could live without the domination of the white man. This is mentioned merely to show that the dictatorial has no place in the Nez Percés make-up. In fact, I have never known a people, white or red, who tried to live so nearly by the laws of right and justice as the Nez Percés.

The Grand Council, or "Talks”

I have had occasion, in the past few pages, to mention the council. Perhaps it would be well here to explain that matters of general tribal moment were settled and

laws for the guidance of the people made at a council, or, as it is called in the Nez Percés tongue, a "talk."

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This rude legislative body was posed of the head chief, his subordinate chiefs, and old men selected from the several tribes. In addition to these, were the tu-ats, priests of the tribal religion, who were entitled to seats by virtue of their office, much the same as the English bishops are entitled to seats in the House of Lords. These tu-ats occupied such a unique position in the Nez Percés scheme of affairs that I shall be obliged to devote some space, hereafter, to their consideration.

To afford a better understanding of how the legislative affairs were worked out among the people, a typical council meeting will be portrayed.

Let us assume that some matter requiring the wisdom of the entire nation has arisen. The head chief calls upon the members of his council to meet at some selected place at a given time-the time usually spring or summer, the place a mountain meadow where forage, wood, and water were plenty; a place too, especially after the advent of white settlement, sufficiently remote so as to insure privacy in their deliberations, for the Indian was naturally a secretive animal and objected to baring his actions to the light of unsympathetic criticism.

Going Into Encampment

The manner of summoning was very similar to that in which the Highland chieftains called together their clans, except that the courier carried, in place of the fiery cross, an arrow adorned with the cognizance of his chief, this, in the family of Joseph, being the white feathers from the tail of the bald eagle. The herald visited, on foot, each tribe and announced to its head men the time and place of meeting. If the matter were urgent and the time short, several messengers were sent out simultaneously. It is rather curious to note that the call for the council was always in the form of a request, never a command. The words were, "Will my brothers meet me?"

A few days prior to the contemplated meeting a general movement of the Indians