distortion of facts, and prevarication, a point very justly emphasized
by Bischoff.[4]

This author relates the case of a paranoiac woman who was in litigation
with her father over some trifling inheritance left by her mother, and
who accused her father of a murder, and insinuated that she had heard
her grandfather call him a fratricide.

The reputation and character of the objects of their delusions are
unsparingly attacked by the paranoiac litigant, and this not
infrequently results in bringing matters to a head, where as defendant
in a criminal suit for libel the paranoiac is recognized in his true
light and sent to a hospital for the insane. Before, however, this final
scene in the litigious career is enacted, especially where the
persecuted has turned persecutor, the objects of his delusions have not
infrequently suffered an untold amount of anguish and financial ruin,
through having been obliged to play the part of defendants in civil
suits based on nothing else but the distorted fancy of a diseased mind.

While one may readily detect the part played by avarice in the pursuits
and activities of these individuals, it requires close contact with
them, especially in the capacity of one who stands between them and
freedom, in order to fully appreciate the degree of malevolence which
they frequently exhibit. Indeed, the study of litigious paranoia, more
than anything else, illustrates how much method there may really be in
madness. Were an alleged lunatic standing as a defendant in a criminal
suit to use one-tenth of the amount of ingenuity and conscious direction
of his symptoms that the average paranoiac uses, he would furnish the
champions of the idea of malingering of mental disease with enough
material to convict a dozen lunatics.

The chief aim of this paper is to illustrate by means of two interesting
case histories the forensic importance of this form of mental disorder.
It is not intended, however, to enter here into an academic discussion
of the problem of paranoia. The term "Paranoia" is even pre-Hippocratic,
and any attempt to indicate, even in the briefest manner, the changes
which this concept has undergone throughout the ages would require
considerably more space than we have at our disposal. I shall,
therefore, merely mention that in reviewing the history of paranoia one
is unmistakably struck by the fact that those view points and ideas
concerning this subject which have indelibly impressed themse