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Regulations broken: General paresis.

Case 12. (Kastan, January, 1916.)

A German 1st-lieutenant, on active service before the war, had left the service because there was not enough for him to do in peace times. During his war service, he became drunk and had two soldiers bound to a doorpost, with coats unbuttoned and without their caps—a process quite verboten. While in Königsberg, he reported himself ill, and failed to go to a designated hospital. He was accordingly treated as a deserter. He ran up bills with landlady and servant girls, saying that he was going to receive money from his wife. Under hospital examination, he said he was only a Baden man with a lively temperament. He got angry at the phrase test feeding, refused food, got excited when asked to help in the care of other patients, and wrote a letter saying, “If it is the idea to make me nervous by removing the air from me, by prescribing rest in bed—a punishment only suitable for a boy who cannot keep himself neat—and such chicaneries, these philanthropic attempts are bound to fail on my robust peasant nerves. Of course I know that money considerations make the stay of every paying patient desirable, but I am really too good for that. [The expenses were being borne by the state.] I have openly stated what is being here done with me is foolery, and I stick to that phrase. The food, already poor enough, is no better, when the meat of a half-rotten cow comes twice to the table.” This patient was, according to Kastan, a victim of general paresis.

Re general paresis and delinquency, Gilles de la Tourette long ago maintained that there was a medicolegal period in paresis. Lépine in his work on Troubles Mentales de la Guerre speaks of the unexpected frequency of general paresis in the army, and calls attention at the outset to the medicolegal period. The danger of overt delinquency is, in fact, greater under military than under civilian conditions on account of the closer surveillance of the soldier. Desertion and thievery are the main forms.