Note A — Chapter IV · THE MALINGERER: A CLINICAL STUDY

Intimate contact with members of the legal profession, both professionally and socially, for some years past has convinced me that the average lawyer still looks upon the ideas concerning crime and the criminal expressed by physicians of a forensic bent as totally unpractical and visionary. It would take only a brief visit to a criminal department of any modern, well-conducted hospital for the insane to convince any fair-minded individual that the physician handles the problem of the criminal not only in a more scientific and rational manner than does one not possessed of this particular training, but also in an eminently more practical manner, even so far as dollars and cents are concerned. I have frequently had patients come under my observation who for a great number of years had been oscillating between penal institutions and hospitals for the insane, in whom each additional sentence did not only fail to bring about the hoped-for reformation, but served to render them more depraved and criminally inclined, and who would have undoubtedly continued this checkered career throughout life, had not their true, unreformable nature been discovered and thus caused their permanent isolation from society, not by the jurist but by the physician. Should reformation ever take place in any of these individuals it is safe to assume that the one who was clear-visioned enough to discover the cause of their antisocial existence would likewise be competent enough to know when this cause has disappeared.