Abstract
Consider the diagnosis offered by a mad-doctor in the case of a seemingly heartless mother, on trial at the Old Bailey in 1877, for murdering her newborn daughter.
Shortly, before she forced the infant 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.” On realizing the horror of her deed, the mother might have called for help, fled the scene, or—as often in cases of child murderer—attempted suicide. Instead, Annie Cherry sat down peaceably and poured herself a cup of afternoon tea.
The physician who was called to the crime scene and later to the court saw in the mother’s act and her subsequent behavior the presence of homicidal mania, a novel species of madness that profoundly challenged the law’s criterion for ascribing criminal culpability: purposeful, intentional behavior.
A pressing matter at the time was how the acceptance of such a disease as homicidal mania would threaten the law’s foundational belief that responsibility was a matter of knowing right from wrong. By its name, homicidal mania bridged law and medicine, crime and madness. Other medicopsychological diagnoses—delusional melancholia, puerperal mania, and epileptic vertigo—compelled the jury to reason from the disease to the crime: only a direct connection between the two carried exculpatory significance. In trials that tuned on homicidal mania however, the crime was the disease. To accept the diagnoses was to find the actions of the accused without criminal intention.
What is interesting here is that what was described here was the features of a novel disease in a court of law, not a royal college of medicine.
Mad-Doctors in the Dock: Defending the Diagnosis, 1760–1913 is the final volume in Joel Peter Eigen’s trilogy, examining the insanity defense in the British courtroom. The first two volumes are Witnessing Insanity: Madness and Mad-Doctors in the English Court and Unconscious Crime: Mental Absence and Criminal Responsibility in Victorian London. This time Eigen has surveyed almost 1,000 Old Bailey trials in which the mental health of the defendant was at issue.
This volume is laid out in six chapters. Chapter 1 examines the legal and criminological elements that characterized the courtroom, the novel appearance of the activist defense attorney, and the renewed attention paid to rules of evidence and standards of proof. The chapter also includes the quantitative dimensions of the sample: the incidence of the plea, rates of participation of medical witnesses, and rates of insanity acquittal.
Chapter 2 offers a survey of medical terms inherited by the medical men who were soon to appear in court and the transformation over time of the meaning associated with the most familiar and enduring terms: melancholia, mania, and delusion. Chapter 3 takes up the variegated universe of medical practitioners in the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly the range in training and education, and considers the effects this variability had on diagnostic patterns.
Chapters 4 and 5 examine the diagnoses offered in court, the changes over time, and noticeable patterns in how the forensic psychiatric witness was examined. Chapter 6 examines the diagnoses of homicidal mania in detail, particularly its grounding in the forensic-friendly concept of delusion and also in a variant of epilepsy that resulted in a convulsion of ideas, not limbs!
The last chapter steps back from the medical witness and the increasingly assertive defense attorney to consider the judge’s role in the rapidly evolving criminal procedures. Conventional wisdom might argue that as the defense attorney rose to prominence and with him greater attention to the trustworthiness of evidence and a tightening of the standard of proof, the bench would experience a corresponding receding of its authority and discretion. This chapter uses the trail narratives to probe this assumption. The role of the remaining courtroom participant—the juror—is left to the conclusion. Among the many treasures yielded up by the courtroom narratives is an important corrective to the notion that Victorian juries were passive participants in the judicial process.
Psychiatry, and particularly forensic psychiatry, is the most culturally informed of medical specialties. The concerns that guided criminal insanity trials from 1760 to 1913 resonated the capacity to control one’s behavior and medical witnesses had found a way to account for the inexplicable and to present their opinion as rooted in experience-based knowledge.
Covering hundreds of trials, Eigen has done an extensive research about a fascinating and important topic in historical criminology. For sociologist of madness and crime, legal scholars, and any reader interested in contemporary criminal procedure, the book is a lovely read, rich in narrative examples, and a sophisticated exploration of the history of the insanity defense.