Charles COPPENS - Morale et médecine - 1901 Lot n° 1024

Essential and particularly interesting work. On reading it, one is completely taken in by Coppens who distinctly formulates the hypotheses necessary for the conception of a humanistic and medical code of ethics. In the 6th conference " Madness or insanity ", Charles Coppens, addresses in particular the question of the judicial expert who will be called upon to validate or invalidate the responsibility of the criminal or murderer according to his proven state of madness. A few formal remarks follow, which are very useful for the choice to be made. "In alienation, mental disturbance sometimes manifests itself on only one point, or on a group of ideas, and on everything else the patient is perfectly reasonable. He is monomaniacal. But he is nevertheless a true lunatic: for he has everything that makes him lunatic. As well, sooner or later his madness, at first confined, spreads to other spheres; and even if this does not happen, he can never be trusted: he is a deranged mind, out of sorts. But beware of confusing monomania with eccentricity; for distinction is of the utmost importance. Eccentricity is a bias not to do like the others and is found in the way of reasoning, of speaking, of acting, with a kind of challenge thrown to popular feeling. The eccentric man knows that he is eccentric, and wants to be so, and accepts in advance the consequences; he is not a lunatic. In alienation there is disturbance, alteration of the brain. The brain is like a repository of images created by the imagination as a result of sensitive perception, or as a result of its spontaneous combinations: it is a library of facts and ghosts; and these images are not alone, but in groups, so that to awaken one is to awaken others. » Further on, he discards the spiritualist theories that were very much in vogue in 1900: "Spiritualism only takes care of doctors by accident: it is a system of religion and morality very much opposed to Christianity" ..... "All this