097 Sheet – American State Trials 1918 Volume X Leo Frank Document

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Reading Time: 4 minutes [513 words]

Here is the translated text as follows:

EDWARD D. WORRELL, 65

I would pat my hands over his eyelids, and it seemed to compose him. He would continually talk, call over the roll of soldiers, and almost invariably call constantly on Lieut. Clark and ask if his horse was ready for him to go to Leavenworth City. Sometimes he was apparently cheerful. The alternations from cheerfulness to depression were not founded on any causes I could account for; they were generally sudden. From the latter part of September 1856, until we came up here, I have not witnessed less than 100 paroxysms. He would have sometimes two a day, not all equally violent; sometimes mere insensibility. Day before yesterday he was going to have an attack; he did not. On one occasion, the paroxysms were so violent I had to open the small trap in the door and called in the under-turnkey, named Mike, to come and help me hold him.

Cross-examined:

None of these temporary symptoms returned on him until after last September term. He was irritable from childhood. I could always control him by a word except in these paroxysms. My corrections of him when young would sometimes increase the excitement, would enrage him more; he did not seem to be able to bear it at all. My friends said I was too strict and I would then relax my discipline. He had but few playmates; had very warm friends amongst them, yet when they were very fond of him, he was irritable towards them.

IN REBUTTAL

Dr. W. W. Bassett:

I am a practitioner of medicine; have lived in St. Louis three or four years. Before that, I lived 16 or 17 years at Manchester, St. Louis County. I have practiced for 21 years. I hold the office of county physician. I have attended Worrell in jail; I saw nothing like derangement of the mind at that time, no symptoms of insanity that I know of. I asked him the usual questions physicians ask patients, and he answered them as satisfactorily as patients usually do. He complained much of headache. I don't know but what it was the common manifestation accompanying chill and fever. I don't think anything was said to me about his having had convulsions. Nothing I heard of or saw induced me to look for anything else than the state of the brain incident to intermittent fever. In 99 cases out of a hundred, a pain in the head, or headache, will accompany a chill or fever. I think, as a physician, I saw him from six to ten times. The causes of insanity are represented to be various. Epileptic fits may be one means of producing insanity. I have never witnessed it complicated with or caused by epilepsy, though it might. This kind or character of insanity produced by epilepsy, so far as I have seen it and from the books, is imbecility, by which I mean the mental faculties are very much impaired. I have repeatedly treated cases of epilepsy in my practice; they were cases of both long and short standing.

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