journeys, but other individuals in the
same state may commit criminal acts like homicide, equally without
reason or gain to themselves. Once the fit is passed, these unfortunate
individuals have generally no recollection of their past actions, and
since in their normal state they are quiet, law-abiding persons, it is
extremely difficult to trace back the deed to the right source, or to
discover the disease, because they show no other symptoms of epilepsy,
apart from the particular criminal act.

Samt describes a still more complicated form of this psychic seizure, in
which the personality is altered without there being any loss of
consciousness. In a case of this kind, a servant, after forty years of
faithful service, murdered his old mistress during the night, having
previously cut all the bell-wires to prevent communication with the
other servants. He escaped with some valuables, but returned in a few
days and gave himself up to the police, to whom he gave a detailed
account of his crime without showing either horror or remorse. He was
tried and condemned, and a few months later was again seized with
epileptic fits during one of which he died. Samt, who saw him in this
state, came to the conclusion that the murder had been committed during
a similar seizure and he was able to prove that attacks of this kind are
not necessarily accompanied by loss of consciousness.

As in the above case, these psychic attacks are sometimes accompanied by
an insatiable thirst for blood, destruction and violence of all kinds,
as well as by an extraordinary development of muscular strength with
apparent lucidity of mind. They may last from a few minutes to half an
hour, after which the patient falls into a sound sleep and forgets
everything that has happened, or else retains only a vague recollection.

Such was the case of the epileptic Misdea, which first suggested to my
father the idea of a link between crime and epilepsy. As this case has
become famous in the annals of crime in Italy, it will perhaps be of
interest to the reader. Misdea, the son of degenerate parents,
manifested a series of typical epileptic anomalies--asymmetry,
vaso-motor disturbances, impulsiveness, ferocity, etc. At the age of
twenty, while serving in the army, for some trivial motive he suddenly
attacked and killed his superior officer and eight or ten soldiers who
tried to overpower him. Finally he was bound and placed in a cell, where
he fell into a sound slu