79 N.J. Eq. 270 | New York Court of Chancery | 1912
In this case I will state briefly the conclusion reached, leaving a fuller statement and opinion to be filed hereafter, if it seems desirable.
The petition is filed by the husband, Harry Brainen, to annul his marriage to defendant, Minnie Brainen (born Minnie Bloch), on account of the defendant’s incapacity to consent— arising from her lunacy at the time of the marriage. It is filed under the Dworce act, 1907, § 1, subsec. 4 (P. L. p. 474), .authorizing decrees of nullity of marriage when “the parties or either of them was, at the time of the marriage incapable of consenting thereto, and the marriage has not been subsequently ratified.” The marriage occurred at Elizabeth, New Jersey, on
The defendant was under treatment in 1904 in a sanitarium and Dr. Prout, the physician in charge, who is now called as the petitioner’s expert, described the patient as then suffering from a mild form of dementia prascox—a derangement accompanying adolescence. The sysptoms of this disease, or some of them, are such as are often shown in types of melancholia. After a treatment of about three months, she left the sanitarium to return home, and was discharged improved. The physician says that she had then apparently lost a great many of the symptoms presented when she first came, but still had some of what the physician calls the “stereotyped expressions” of the disease. There are, he says, cases of complete recovery from this disease, and the percentage of partial recovery, where the patient is capable of assuming more or less of the duties of life, is, he says, perhaps as high as twenty-five. From the time of Miss Bloch’s return to her parent’s home in the fall of 1904,
If the petitioner’s evidence be taken as substantially true, it may, in connection with the evidence of the expert, be taken as perhaps establishing that at the time of the marriage contract, a tendency to a recurrence of the disease existed, and that there were some symptoms indicating the danger of such return. A marriage of a patient who has been previously insane from disease cannot be invalidated merely by reason of a tendency, or liability to recurrence.
Such tendency may be a sufficient medical reason why persons subject thereto should not marry, and Dr. Prout’s own evidence on this point is,
“tliat any patient that has recovered from this form of mental disease, and in which there is any future impairment of judgment, should never marry, because marriage will really be visited with disaster.” •
This statement shows, I think, the aspect in which he regards the question of mental capacity at the time of the contract, and that it is the medical rather than the legal aspect. The difference between the two standpoints is emphasized by Vice-Chancellor Green in Kern v. Kern, supra (at p. 586).
The circumstances previous to and in connection with the marriage ceremony, relied on by the petitioner as establishing the existence of disease at that time, to the extent of incapacitating defendant from entering into the contract, relate mainly