Public Perceptions of Moral Insanity in the 19th Century (original) (raw)

Dis)articulating Morality and Myth An Ideological History of the Insanity Defense

2014

Both law and medicine are interpretive practices, and both systems have historically worked in tandem, however ineffectively or tumultuously. The law is, by social mandate, imagined as a "fixed" system of social control, made up of rules and procedures grounded in a reality that is independent of language; although we know that law is both revised and interpreted every day in courtroom practice, to imagine the law, the system that keeps bad people behind bars and good people safe, as indeterminate or, worse, fallible, produces social anxieties that upend our cultural assumptions about fairness that predate our judicial system. This imaginary stability, then, is ultimately what prevents the legal system from evolving in consonance with developments in the mental health professions, as inadequate as that discursive system may be for describing and categorizing the infinite possibilities of mental illness, specifically where it is relevant to the commission of a crime. Ultimately, the insanity plea raises the specter of the endless interpretability of the law and mental illness and, therefore, the frailty of the justice system, which makes each insanity defense trial emblematic of larger social anxieties about social control, fairness, and susceptibility to mental illness or the actions of mentally ill people.

“A Fool For His Client:” Religion, Law, and Insanity in Nineteenth-Century America

2021

When Charles Guiteau killed U.S. President James Garfield, he claimed that God had ordered him to do so. During his trial, Guiteau’s lawyers plead not guilty by reason of insanity, and the question of Guiteau’s innocence or guilt quickly became a question about the very nature of insanity itself. In late nineteenth-century America, the concept of insanity was the subject of constant academic debate, with early psychiatrists arguing whether it was caused by physical disease, moral weakness, or even radical forms of Christianity. I use the trial of Charles Guiteau as a case study of the evolving conceptualizations of mental illness in the Gilded Age. I also examine the role that the insanity debate played in shaping nineteenth-century American psychiatry, and the implications that it had on the role of the insanity defense in American law.

Religion, “Moral Insanity,” and Psychology in Nineteenth-Century America

This article explores arguments among medico-legal experts (including Amariah Brigham, Isaac Ray, John P. Gray, and W. A. Hammond) about the social and moral ramifications of expanding the definition of insanity to include moral insanity. This is an important corrective to a standard view that sees the movement to transform the insanity defense in nineteenth-century America as a rejection of the explanatory power of human depravity in the face of an optimistic understanding of human nature as found in Scottish common sense philosophy. The debate, especially between Ray and Brigham, on the one hand, and Gray, on the other, finally led to a situation in which religious discussions of sin, the will, grace, and the shape of the human self were legally sidelined. Keywords:moral insanity, sin, nineteenth century, insanity defense, Isaac Ray, John P. Gray

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 (

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.

Feigned insanity in nineteenth-century America: Tactics, trials, and truth

Behavioral Sciences & the Law, 1990

Feigned insanity in nineteenth-century America is appraised through a review of the medical and legal literature. The authors focus on the explanations for feigning, procedures used in uncovering feigning, and the role of feigning in the courtroom. This discussion of feigned insanity demonstrates the remarkable consistency of approach to this form of malingering over the past 200 years.