Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-hvd4g Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-11T12:48:47.279Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Lesion of the Will: Medical Resolve and Criminal Responsibility in Victorian Insanity Trials

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Joel Peter Eigen
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Analysis of courtroom testimony heard in London's Central Criminal Court in the 10 years following the McNaughtan acquittal (1843) reveals the effort of medical witnesses to establish a distinctive and essential voice in the Victorian insanity trial. Three trials that illustrate this effort are examined for the manner in which practitioners of mental medicine distinguished their opinion from the layperson's fact and, in the process, engaged pivotal issues for the determination of criminal responsibility. Their testimony and the attorneys' questions that elicited it suggest that whatever reliance the judiciary might have placed on the McNaughtan Rules to confine testimony to the defendant's capacity to “know right from wrong,” medical witnesses devised ways to circumvent and indeed dismiss the relevance of this particular inquiry.

Type
Professional and Popular Conceptions of Criminal Responsibility
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , 1999 , pp. 425 - 459
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by The Law and Society Association.

References

References

Baker, J. H. (1977) “Criminal Courts and Procedure at Common Law, 1550–1800,” in Cockburn, J. S., ed., Crime in England 1550–1800. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.Google Scholar
British and Foreign Medical Review (1843) Book Review, 16 British & Foreign Medical Rev., July, p. 82.Google Scholar
Crawford, Catherine (1987) “The Emergence of English Forensic Medicine: Medical Evidence in Common Law Courts, 1730–1830.” D. Phil, Oxford Univ.Google Scholar
Eigen, Joel Peter (1991) “Delusion in the Courtroom: The Role of Partial Insanity in Early Forensic Testimony,” 35 Medical History 25–49.Google Scholar
Eigen, Joel Peter (1995) Witnessing Insanity: Madness and Mad-Doctors in the English Court. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Esquirol, J. E. D. (1845) Mental Maladies, A Treatise on Insanity, trans. Hunt, E. K.. Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard.Google Scholar
Forbes, Thomas Rogers (1977a) “Inquests in London and Middlesex Homicides, 1673–1782,” 50 Yale J. of Biological Medicine 207–20.Google Scholar
Forbes, Thomas Rogers (1977b) “Coroners' Inquests in the County of Middlesex, England, 1819–1842,” 32 J. of the History of Medicine & Allied Sciences 375–94.Google Scholar
Forbes, Thomas Rogers (1985) Surgeons at the Bailey: English Forensic Medicine to 1878. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Goldstein, Jan (1987) Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Green, Thomas Andrew (1985) Verdict according to Conscience: Perspectives on the English Criminal Trial, 1200–1800. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hale, Matthew (1736) The History of the Pleas of the Crown. London: E. & R. Nutt.Google Scholar
Haley, Bruce (1978) The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hand, Learned (1901) “Historical and Practical Considerations regarding Expert Testimony,” 15 Harvard Law Rev. 40–58.Google Scholar
Haslam, John (1817) Medical Jurisprudence as It Relates to Insanity according to the Law of England. London: C. Hunter.Google Scholar
Hay, Douglas (1975) “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law,” in Hay, D. et al., eds., Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Hay, D. (1982) “War, Dearth, and Theft in the Eighteenth-Century: The Record of the English Courts,” 95 Past & Present 117–60.Google Scholar
King, Peter (1984) “Decision-Makers and Decision-Making in the English Criminal Law 1750–1800,” 27 Historical J. 25–58.Google Scholar
Langbein, John H. (1978) “The Criminal Trial before the Lawyers,” 45 Univ. of Chicago Law Rev. 263–316.Google Scholar
Langbein, John H. (1983a) “Shaping the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Trial: A View from the Ryder Sources,” 50 Univ. of Chicago Law Rev. 1–136.Google Scholar
Langbein, John H. (1983b) “Albion's Fatal Flaws,” 98 Past & Present 96–120.Google Scholar
MacDonald, Michael (1981) Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Marc, Charles-Chrétien-Henri (1840) De la folie, considérée dans ses rapports avec les questions médico-judiciares. Pt. 1. Paris: J. B. Baillière.Google Scholar
Mill, James (1869) Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, vol. 2. London: Longmans Green Reader & Dyer.Google Scholar
Moran, Richard (1981) Knowing Right from Wrong: The Insanity Defense of Daniel McNaughtan. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Moran, Richard (1985) “The Origin of Insanity as a Special Verdict; The Trial for Treason of James Hadfield (1800),” 19 Law & Society Rev. 487–519.Google Scholar
Moran, Richard (1986) “The Punitive Uses of the Insanity Defense: The Trial for Treason of Edward Oxford (1840),” 9 International J. of Law and Psychiatry 171–90.Google Scholar
Pinel, Philippe (1806) A Treatise on Insanity, trans. Davis, D. D.. Sheffield, Eng.: W. Todd.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Porter, Roy (1987) Mind-Forg'd Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency. London: Athlone Press.Google Scholar
Prichard, James C. (1835) A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind. London: Sherwood, Gilbert, & Piper.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quen, Jacques M. (1969) “James Hadfield and Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity,” 69 New York State J. of Medicine 1221–26.Google Scholar
Smith, Roger (1981) Trial by Medicine: Insanity and Responsibility in Victorian Trials. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Walker, Nigel D. (1968) Crime and Insanity in England, Vol. 1, The Historical Perspective. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Weiner, Dora B. (1990) “Mind and Body in the Clinic: Philippe Pinel, Alexander Crichton, Dominique Esquirol, and the Birth of Psychiatry,” in Rousseau, G. S., ed., The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press 331–402.Google Scholar
Wiener, Martin J. (1990) Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law, and Policy in England, 1830–1914. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Wigmore, John Henry (1978) Evidence in Trials at Common Law, vol. 7. Boston: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Winslow, Forbes (1843) The Plea of Insanity in Criminal Cases. London: H. Ren-shaw.Google Scholar

Cases

Frye v. United States, 293 F. 1014 D.C. Cir. (1923).Google Scholar
Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 113 S.Ct. 2786 (1993).Google Scholar