A terrible responsibility. Murder and the insanity defence in England 1908-1939 (original) (raw)

The notion of 'Insanity'and the Mental Hospitals of the Nineteenth Century: A Study

reflectionedu.com

In 1897, during his visit to London celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of Queen Victoria's ascension to the throne, Mark Twain observed, 'British history is two thousand years old and yet in a good many ways the world has moved farther ahead since the Queen was born than it moved in all the rest of the two thousand put together.' 1 Twain's remark captures the sense of dizzying change that characterized nineteenth century Britain. Several radical changes took place. The shift from a land based economy to a modern urban economy based on trade and manufacturing was the most important aspect of the nineteenth century. By the beginning of the Victorian period, the Industrial Revolution had already brought about profound economic and social changes, including a mass migration of workers to industrial towns where they lived in new urban slums. The extension of the franchise resulted in widespread democratization. The century was also affected by challenges to the established religious faith. There was rapid advancement of scientific knowledge and progress was marked in all spheres of life.

Case notes, case histories, and the patient's experience of insanity at Gartnavel Royal Asylum, Glasgow, in the nineteenth century

Social history of medicine, 1998

This article is concerned primarily with questions as to how and why case notes were produced and utilized, and how they may (or may not) be used by historians. More specifically, it discusses how the Glasgow Royal Asylum's case notes may be deployed to access patients' experiences of madness and confinement. The deficiencies and biases of the case record are also explored. So too is the relationship of case notes with other asylum based records, including reception order questionnaires, with a separate section on patient writings as part of the case history corpus. This leads into an analysis of how the Asylum's case notes became case histories and for what purposes. These subjects are related to changes and continuities in medical ideologies about insanity, social attitudes to the insane and the nature of medical practice in asylums. Some fundamental shifts in emphasis in the use of the case note and case history occurred in this period. These shifts were associated with an increased emphasis on organic interpretations of mental disease and on clinical approaches to insanity; with the medicalization of asylum records and the wider discourse on insanity, and with declining deference to the public at large in the presentation of cases. The survey concludes by analysing the changing place of patient testimony within the case record.

From Paranoia Querulans to Vexatious Litigants - a short study on madness, between psychiatry and the Law Part 1

A short study on madness between psychiatry and the law. Part 1. Abstract This paper presents a comparative history of paranoia querulans, also known as litigants' delusion, in German--speaking countries and France from the nineteenth century onwards. We first focus on two classic literary works which describe litigious behaviours later pathologised, then give insight into the history of Querulantenwahn (litigants' delusion), a term coined in 1857 by Johann Ludwig Casper and adopted by German--speaking psychiatrists and forensic experts. The last section is devoted to its French equivalent, the delusion of the litigious persecuted--persecutors. We show how this category, widely popular among French fin--de-siecle alienists, was replaced by another: the delusion of revendication (litigious subtype). The history of the vexatious litigants in the English--speaking world will be explored in the second part of this paper.

'Am I mad?': The Windham case and Victorian resistance to psychiatry

History of Psychiatry, 2019

This article revisits the notorious trial of William Windham, a wealthy young man accused of lunacy. The trial in 1861-2 saw the country's foremost experts on psychological medicine very publicly debate the concepts, symptoms and diagnosis of insanity. I begin by surveying the trial and the testimonies of medical experts. Their disparate assessments of Windham evoked heated reactions in the press and Parliament; these reactions are the focus of the second section. I then proceed to examine criticism of psychiatry in the newspapers more generally in the 1860s, outlining the political resistance to psychiatry and the responses of some leading psychiatrists. In conclusion, I consider what this says about the politics of medicalization at the time.

Historical profiles of criminal insanity

International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 2002

relatively little is known about the lives of the criminally insane themselves. Apart from their official depictions in court documents and published legal judgments, forensic populations of the past remain a near-invisible constituency in the historiography of psychiatric and judicial systems. As Eigen (1995, p. 163) writes, ''[o]ne looks in vain for a sustained treatment of the patient's thought-world.'' For the most part, in the historical pursuit of the medicolegal subject, we are restricted to a scattering of early surveys of hospital inpatients (