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

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Reading Time: 3 minutes [406 words]

Here is the translated text as follows:

EDWARD D. WORRELL. 141

How admirably does the author's description of feigned epilepsy apply to the case of the prisoner at the bar. Has a single instance of personal injury been sustained in any of the attacks mentioned? Why is it that Dr. Bassett, who was physician to the jail five months after the defendant was confined there, and who saw him daily and attended him in a slight attack of intermittent fever, never discovered any symptoms of epilepsy? And yet, as soon as Dr. Bassett ceased to attend the jail, the prisoner had one hundred fits in rapid succession, witnessed by no person but his mother. There is no evidence that the jailer, or any other person whose duty it is to take charge of the prisoner, ever saw him in one of these convulsions.

He served a considerable time in the army, and no person there ever saw him in one of them. Both Mr. Raisin and Mr. Ringold say in their depositions that they never heard of his having fits. Is it not then fair to infer that his is a case of simulated epilepsy, resorted to on some occasions to conceal his dissipated habits from his parents, and in the jail to furnish his mother with an apology for committing a high crime, and to lay a foundation for this defense?

But suppose, for the sake of the argument, we admit that the five instances referred to in the testimony were cases of real epilepsy, what conclusion is to be drawn from that fact? It is conceded by all writers on medical jurisprudence that the natural tendency of the disease is to produce imbecility and fatuity, and it requires many years with attacks at short intervals even to produce this result.

Dr. Bassett and Dr. Bannister, both of whom stand high in their profession, say "that to produce imbecility, the complaint must be of long standing and the intervals between the attacks very short." Dr. Bannister, for several years, has been physician to the City Hospital of St. Louis, where lunatics are occasionally treated; he was also for one year an attending physician in the Philadelphia Hospital, where they had, on average, one hundred and eighty insane persons under treatment. Yet, he never knew a case of insanity to result from epilepsy, though he informs you that it is stated in the books that it sometimes terminates in that way.