Author : Joel Peter Eigen
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 223 pages
File Size : 25,20 MB
Release : 2016-10-27
Category : History
ISBN : 1421420481
The first comprehensive account of how medical insight and folk psychology met in the courtroom, this book makes clear the tragedy of the crimes, the spectacle of the trials, and the consequences of the diagnosis for the emerging field of forensic psychiatry.
Author : Joel Peter Eigen
Publisher : Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM
Page : 332 pages
File Size : 12,33 MB
Release : 2016-11-06
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 142142049X
“Detailed courtroom narratives . . . give us a colorful and gripping sense of the life-and-death maneuvers involved in mounting an insanity defense.” —Andrew Scull, author of Madness in Civilization Shortly before she pushed her infant daughter headfirst into a bucket of water and fastened the lid, Annie Cherry warmed the pail because, as she later explained to a police officer, “It would have been cruel to put her in cold water.” Afterwards, this mother sat down and poured herself a cup of tea. At Cherry’s trial at the Old Bailey in 1877, Henry Charlton Bastian, physician to the National Hospital for the Paralyzed and Epileptic, focused his testimony on her preternatural calm following the drowning. Like many other late Victorian medical men, Bastian believed that the mother’s act and her subsequent behavior indicated homicidal mania, a novel species of madness that challenged the law’s criterion for assigning criminal culpability. How did Dr. Bastian and his cohort of London’s physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries—originally known as “mad-doctors”—arrive at such an innovative diagnosis, and how did they defend it in court? Mad-Doctors in the Dock is a sophisticated exploration of the history of the insanity defense in the English courtroom from the middle of the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. Joel Peter Eigen examines courtroom testimony offered in nearly 1,000insanity trials, transporting us into the world of psychiatric diagnosis and criminal justice. The first comprehensive account of how medical insight and folk psychology met in the courtroom, this book makes clear the tragedy of the crimes, the spectacle of the trials, and the consequences of the diagnosis for the emerging field of forensic psychiatry.
Author : Robert I. Simon
Publisher : American Psychiatric Pub
Page : 626 pages
File Size : 17,1 MB
Release : 2004
Category : Medical
ISBN : 9781585620876
General clinicians conduct most forensic psychiatric examinations and provide most psychiatric testimony. Yet these clinicians often receive little or no training in forensic psychiatry, leaving them ill prepared to meet the inevitable ethical and legal challenges that arise. Both timely and informative, this textbook is the first reference designed and written for both the general clinician and the experienced forensic psychiatrist. Here, 28 recognized experts introduce the forensic subjects that commonly arise in clinical practice. Unique in the literature, this outstanding collection covers • Introductory subjects—Organized psychiatry and forensic practice; the legal system and the distinctions between therapeutic and forensic roles; business aspects of starting a forensic practice; the role of the expert witness; the differences between the ethics of forensic and clinical psychiatry; the use of DSM in the courtroom; and issues that arise in working with attorneys• Civil litigation—The standard of care and psychiatric malpractice; civil competency; issues in conducting evaluations for personal injury litigation; personal injury claims of psychiatric harm; and disability determination and other employment-related psychiatric evaluations• Criminal justice—Competency to stand trial and insanity evaluations; the use of actuarial and clinical assessments in the evaluation of sexual offenders; psychiatry in correctional settings; and the relationship between psychiatry and law enforcement, including mental health training, crisis negotiation, and fitness for duty evaluations• Special topics—Assessment of malingering; evaluations of children and adolescents; violence risk assessments; the use of prediction instruments to determine "dangerousness"; and the evolving standard of expert psychological testimony Each chapter is organized around case examples and includes a review of key concepts, practical guidelines, and references for further reading. A study guide is also available for use in teaching, in studying, and in preparing for the forensic board examination. This practical textbook makes this interesting specialty accessible to trainees and seasoned practitioners. With its detailed glossary of legal terms, subject index, and index of legal cases, it will be a welcome addition to all psychiatric residency and forensic fellowship programs.
Author : Alison C. Pedley
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 10,4 MB
Release : 2023-07-13
Category : History
ISBN : 1350275336
Tracing the experiences of women who were designated insane by judicial processes from 1850 to 1900, this book considers the ideas and purposes of incarceration in three dedicated facilities: Bethlem, Fisherton House and Broadmoor. The majority of these patients had murdered, or attempted to murder, their own children but were not necessarily condemned as incurably evil by medical and legal authorities, nor by general society. Alison C. Pedley explores how insanity gave the Victorians an acceptable explanation for these dreadful crimes, and as a result, how admission to a dedicated asylum was viewed as the safest and most human solution for the 'madwomen' as well as for society as a whole. Mothers, Criminal Insanity and the Asylum in Victorian England considers the experiences, treatments and regimes women underwent in an attempt to redeem and rehabilitate them, and return them to into a patriarchal society. It shows how society's views of the institutions and insanity were not necessarily negative or coloured by fear and revulsion, and highlights the changes in attitudes to female criminal lunacy in the second half of the 19th century. Through extensive and detailed research into the three asylums' archives and in legal, governmental, press and genealogical records, this book sheds new light on the views of the patients themselves, and contributes to the historiography of Victorian criminal lunatic asylums, conceptualising them as places of recovery, rehabilitation and restitution.
Author : Catherine L. Evans
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 299 pages
File Size : 33,23 MB
Release : 2021-01-01
Category : Law
ISBN : 0300242743
A study of the internal tensions of British imperial rule told through murder and insanity trials Unsound Empire is a history of criminal responsibility in the nineteenth-century British Empire told through detailed accounts of homicide cases across three continents. If a defendant in a murder trial was going to hang, he or she had to deserve it. Establishing the mental element of guilt--criminal responsibility--transformed state violence into law. And yet, to the consternation of officials in Britain and beyond, experts in new scientific fields posited that insanity was widespread and growing, and evolutionary theories suggested that wide swaths of humanity lacked the self-control and understanding that common law demanded. Could it be fair to punish mentally ill or allegedly "uncivilized" people? Could British civilization survive if killers avoided the noose?
Author : Catherine Cox
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 317 pages
File Size : 14,77 MB
Release : 2022-03-10
Category : History
ISBN : 1108834558
The first historical study to offer an in-depth exploration of the complex relationship between the prison and mental breakdown.
Author : Elwin Hofman
Publisher : Manchester University Press
Page : 249 pages
File Size : 16,64 MB
Release : 2021-04-27
Category : History
ISBN : 1526153130
This highly original study brings together the disparate histories of murder and enlightenment, prostitution and the cult of nature, sodomy and sentimentalism in order to retell the story of the making of the modern self. It suggests that the history of the self needs to attend more to its class dimensions, and puts this insight into practice by examining the influence of the criminal courts in spreading and negotiating changing ideas of the self. Using criminal interrogations and witness statements, Trials of the self shows that an increasing stress on psychological depth in the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was not only important for elites, but also for common and illiterate people – sometimes even more so.
Author : Katherine D. Watson
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 303 pages
File Size : 31,62 MB
Release : 2019-12-06
Category : History
ISBN : 1000765377
This monograph makes a major new contribution to the historiography of criminal justice in England and Wales by focusing on the intersection of the history of law and crime with medical history. It does this through the lens provided by one group of historical actors, medical professionals who gave evidence in criminal proceedings. They are the means of illuminating the developing methods and personnel associated with investigating and prosecuting crime in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when two linchpins of modern society, centralised policing and the adversarial criminal trial, emerged and matured. The book is devoted to two central questions: what did medical practitioners contribute to the investigation of serious violent crime in the period 1700 to 1914, and what impact did this have on the process of criminal justice? Drawing on the details of 2,600 cases of infanticide, murder and rape which occurred in central England, Wales and London, the book offers a comparative long-term perspective on medico-legal practice – that is, what doctors actually did when they were faced with a body that had become the object of a criminal investigation. It argues that medico-legal work developed in tandem with and was shaped by the needs of two evolving processes: pre-trial investigative procedures dominated successively by coroners, magistrates and the police; and criminal trials in which lawyers moved from the periphery to the centre of courtroom proceedings. In bringing together for the first time four groups of specialists – doctors, coroners, lawyers and police officers – this study offers a new interpretation of the processes that shaped the modern criminal justice system.
Author : William Cornish
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 781 pages
File Size : 31,48 MB
Release : 2019-10-31
Category : Law
ISBN : 1509931252
Law and Society in England 1750–1950 is an indispensable text for those wishing to study English legal history and to understand the foundations of the modern British state. In this new updated edition the authors explore the complex relationship between legal and social change. They consider the ways in which those in power themselves imagined and initiated reform and the ways in which they were obliged to respond to demands for change from outside the legal and political classes. What emerges is a lively and critical account of the evolution of modern rights and expectations, and an engaging study of the formation of contemporary social, administrative and legal institutions and ideas, and the road that was travelled to create them. The book is divided into eight chapters: Institutions and Ideas; Land; Commerce and Industry; Labour Relations; The Family; Poverty and Education; Accidents; and Crime. This extensively referenced analysis of modern social and legal history will be invaluable to students and teachers of English law, political science, and social history.
Author : Joel Peter Eigen
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 238 pages
File Size : 12,58 MB
Release : 2004-12-01
Category : Medical
ISBN : 080188148X
A sleepwalking, homicidal nursemaid; a "morally vacant" juvenile poisoner; a man driven to arson by a "lesion of the will"; an articulate and poised man on trial for assault who, while conducting his own defense, undergoes a profound personality change and becomes a wild and delusional "alter." These people are not characters from a mystery novelist's vivid imagination, but rather defendants who were tried at the Old Bailey, London's central criminal court, in the mid-nineteenth century. In Unconscious Crime, Joel Peter Eigen explores these and other cases in which defendants did not conform to any of the Victorian legal system's existing definitions of insanity yet displayed convincing evidence of mental aberration. Instead, they were—or claimed to be—"missing," "absent," or "unconscious": lucid, though unaware of their actions. Based on extensive research in the Old Bailey Sessions Papers (verbatim courtroom narratives taken down in shorthand during the trial and sold on the street the following day), Eigen's book reveals a growing estrangement between law and medicine over the legal concept of the Person as a rational and purposeful actor with a clear understanding of consequences. The McNaughtan Rules of l843 had formalized the Victorian insanity plea, guiding the courts in cases of alleged delusion and derangement. But as Eigen makes clear in the cases he discovered, even though defense attorneys attempted to broaden the definition of insanity to include mental absence, the courts and physicians who testified as experts were wary of these novel challenges to the idea of human agency and responsibility. Combining the colorful intrigue of courtroom drama and the keen insights of social history, Unconscious Crime depicts Victorian England's legal and medical cultures confronting a new understanding of human behavior, and provocatively suggests these trials represent the earliest incarnation of double consciousness and multiple personality disorder.
