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Expertise, procedure and the possibility of a comparative history of forensic psychiatry in the nineteenth century*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 July 2009

Roger Smith
Roger Smith*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Lancaster
*
†Address for correspondence: Dr Roger Smith, Department of History, University of Lancaster, Lancaster LAI 4YG.
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Synopsis

The comparative history of forensic psychiatry may help unravel relations between legal and administrative procedure, medical knowledge and expertise, and social interests, as they determine judgements about the criminal responsibility of the mentally disordered. But little has been done to compare the past or the present under different jurisdictions. This paper, therefore, suggests some points which would encourage such comparisons, and particularly a comparison between France and England in the nineteenth century, for both of which countries there is now a valuable historical literature. It also illustrates the complex interaction of procedure and medical expertise by reference to the case of George Victor Townley (1863).

Type
Research Article
Information
Psychological Medicine , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , May 1989 , pp. 289 - 300
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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Footnotes

*

This paper was originally presented at a joint meeting of the Centre de Recherche en Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques, Cite des Sciences et de I'lndustrie and the Sociélé Française pour l'Histoire des Sciences de l'Homme, Paris, September 1987; and it was privately published in Roger Smith, Criminal Responsibility, Psychiatry and History: Three Essays (1988), Centre for Science Studies, University of Lancaster, and Centre de Recherche en Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques, Cité des Sciences et de l'lndustrie, Paris.

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