APPENDIX OF CASES.
105
to prevent a man’s ability of earning liis livelihood. If it
were not the intention to include it, the rules of the society
-should be framed so as expressly to exclude it.
Quain, J.—I am also of opinion that insanity is sick
ness within the society’s rules. The preamble of the rules
is wide enough to include it; the words of Rule 13, en
titling the member to relief, are “ during any sickness or
accident,” except certain excluded cases, insanity not being
one. There is nothing to show that temporary illness
only was contemplated; and if we look at Rule 32, that
seems to show that blindness was intended in general to
be included, as it exempts it in particular cases, and blind
ness is certainly not temporary in most cases.
Archibald, J., concurred.
Case remitted to the justices accordingly.
The following extract from the judgment of Mr. Serjeant
Wheeler in the Liveipool County Court in a case of
Church v. The Great Southern Sick and Burial Society, is
interesting, as showing the medical aspect of the question
whether insanity is or is not bodily sickness:—It is ne
cessary in considering the question to bear in mind
the natural and essential relations of mind and body.
Every manifestation of mind in this life is made by and
through its bodily organ, the brain, and the mind is so
influenced by the brain that the condition of the former is
an invariable index to the constitution and condition of
the latter. Hence all causes of temporary or permanent
disturbance in the health of those parts of the brain that
manifest the mind produce in the same degree the signs of
mental derangement, and vice versd all symptoms of mental
derangement indicate a proportionate disturbance in the
sanitary state of the mind’s bodily organ, the brain. Some
years since when it rvas a common circumstance to examine
the brain with the aid only of the naked eye, it was not
possible in many cases to discover those lesions of brain
structure which produce and accompany insanity. But now,
by the recent application of the microscope, the minute
structure of the brain is revealed, and pathologists can
trace distinctly the very seat and nature of those morbid
changes which are the real essence of insanity. Hence
Schroeder van der Kolk, an eminent German anatomist, says
K. 2