Unsound Mind
The Cyclopedic Law Dictionary · Walter A. Shumaker and George Foster Longsdorf; ed. James C. Cahill · 1922
The Cyclopedic Law Dictionary
or UNSOUND MEMory. These words have been adopted in several statutes, and sometimes indiscriminately used, to signify not only "lunacy," which is periodical madness, but also a permanent adventitious insanity^ as distinguished from idiocy.
1 Ridg. Pari. Gas. 518; 3 Atk. 171.
The term "unsound mind" seems to have been used in those statutes in the same sense as "insane;" but they have been said to import that the party was in some such sta!te as was contradistinguished from idiocy and from lunacy, and yet such as made him a proper subject of a commission to inquire of idiocy and lunacy.
Shelf. Lun. 5; Ray, Med. Jur. prel. § 8; 8 Ves. 66; 12 Ves. 447; 19 Ves. 286; 1 Beck, Med. Jur. 573; Cooper, Ch. Gas. 108; 2 Madd. Chanc. Prac. 731, 732.