Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, June 1899: Volume LVVarious
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, June 1899: Volume LV
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
The same double personality that is apparent in the writing is
attested in the psychology. We have seen that Luccheni was kind to
children, that he was a good servant, characteristics quite opposed to
the anarchistic nature, and a genial companion; a man who in Africa
was enthusiastically fond of military life; who, a little while
before, when he was in the service of the captain, had expressed
extreme monarchical sentiments; and finally, when he had become an
anarchist, again asked his master to be restored to his service. This
double personality is another of the essential characteristics of
hysteria and epilepsy.
I have recently studied an epileptoid degenerate who has a sound mind,
and, at least in his normal state, is quiet and gentle. But as soon as
he has taken hardly more than ninety grammes of alcohol (96° proof) he
becomes a wild anarchist, with fierce impulses and hallucinations, of
which he has no recollection two hours afterward, or even charges them
to his comrades. In this case a double personality is revealed, the
demonstration of which is completed by alterations of the visual field
and of the touch.
We have, then, in Luccheni a degenerate and probably epileptic person
descended from an alcoholic father. Although he affirms that he is not
insane or a criminal born, he is a little of both, for he is epileptic
and hysterical, so that his denial is already a beginning of a proof
of disease. Luccheni also confirms what I have tried to demonstrate in
my _Delitto politico_--that the most frequent organic cause of similar
morbid impulses of a political character is hystero-epilepsy; for not
only do the declarations of some of his countrymen point to epilepsy,
and the characteristics of degeneration in the skull confirm it, but
his inheritance from an alcoholic father and that impulsiveness and
that double personality, which make him pass from the gentlest of men
to the cruelest, and which is reflected in the macrography alternating
with the micrography of the intervals between the spasms, are
accumulative evidence of it.
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