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  • Mad-Doctors in the Dock: Defending the Diagnosis, 1760–1913 by Joel Peter Eigen
  • Rohan McWilliam
Mad-Doctors in the Dock: Defending the Diagnosis, 1760–1913, by Joel Peter Eigen; pp. xiii + 206. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016, $40.00.

Readers of Beryl Bainbridge's fine 1985 novel Watson's Apology will recall the case of John Selby Watson, the outwardly dull schoolmaster and clergyman who brutally killed his wife in 1871 and then swallowed prussic acid in a failed attempt at suicide. The sensational trial that ensued had to determine whether or not he was insane and drew on the testimony of four leading physicians. The most well-known of these was Henry Maudsley, who ascribed the schoolmaster's motivations to melancholia, a state of mind that was different, in his view, from homicidal mania, a category he described in his writings. Watson was found guilty and sentenced to death, despite the defense plea of insanity, though the Home Office later commuted this to life imprisonment (an acknowledgement that Watson may have been suffering from a form of temporary insanity). [End Page 306]

For Joel Peter Eigen in Mad-Doctors in the Dock: Defending the Diagnosis, 1760–1913, what is important about this case is the way that doctors were brought into the courtroom to speak about the defendant's frame of mind. Mad-Doctors in the Dock is the third of a trilogy in which this sociologist has examined the insanity defense in the English courtroom. The two earlier volumes are Witnessing Insanity: Madness and Mad-Doctors in the English Court (1995) and Unconscious Crime: Mental Absence and Criminal Responsibility in Victorian London (2003). The three volumes together make up a profound exploration of medicine, law, and society, though each can be read independently. What is at stake here is the development of expertise. Eigen's approach links up well with what the great social historian Harold Perkin called "the rise of professional society" (the title of his important 1989 book). The expertise of professionals such as Maudsley came to play a major role in determining whether the defendant was "not guilty by reason of insanity" (30). Eigen rewrites much of what we know about the insanity defense. His trilogy (especially this latest) is also vital for understanding the development of the English trial. The volumes explore the emergence of adversarial advocacy, the skill of cross-examination by barristers, and the employment of judicial discretion. Judges used the trial as a tool with which to discover the causes of mental illness.

Mad-Doctors in the Dock commences in 1760 when John Monro, Physician Superintendent of Bethlem, appeared in the famous case of Laurence Shirley, Fourth Earl Ferrers, to speak about whether or not the defendant was of unsound mind when he killed his servant. Monro had never even met Ferrers (who was hanged), but was asked to speak about the symptoms of lunacy. Eigen explores 994 trials at the Old Bailey between 1760 and 1913 that turned on insanity in some form. The conventional historiography of the insanity defense is usually built around three major cases, all of which feature in this book. In 1800, James Hadfield was acquitted (though later sent to an asylum) for trying to shoot King George III (he was judged to be suffering from apocalyptic millenarian delusions). In 1840, Edward Oxford was similarly confined (rather than executed) for attempting to assassinate Queen Victoria. Three years later, Daniel McNaughtan shot Edward Drummond, Robert Peel's secretary, apparently believing him to be the Prime Minister, and ended up in Bethlem Royal Hospital. His trial led to the formulation of the McNaughtan Rules, which clarified the insanity defense. Eigen demonstrates that the legal test—incapable of knowing right from wrong—had been in use well before the McNaughtan Rules.

Who were the mad-doctors? Between 1760 and 1913, they comprised 375 witnesses, making 1,200 court appearances. They were physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries, including superintendents of asylums such as Bethlem and Broadmoor, the first asylum for the criminally insane. These mad-doctors had to struggle against popular perceptions that they were agents of unscrupulous relatives trying to lock up difficult people (often to...

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