Joel Peter Eigen. Mad-Doctors in the Dock

The intersection of mental illness, crime, and law has fascinated observers of the courts, among them legal and medical historians and sociologists. Heinous crimes, often involving brutal murders of family members by those closest to them, left in their wakes communities asking why and looking for a motive or a reason. For legal historians, these extreme cases allow for an examination of the question of criminal intent, or mens rea, and the ways in which judges and jurors have defined responsibility and exceptions from it. Joel Peter Eigen’s study of the medical testimony involving “mad-doctors” has resulted in his publication of three monographs on the subject. The third in this trilogy, Mad-Doctors in the Dock, seeks to answer a seemingly simple question about the diagnosis of homicidal mania, tracing its medical and legal origins, and demonstrating how it became an accepted explanation for crime. As Eigen points out, the law approached issues of guilt or innocence as a binary, while “psychiatric testimony, on the other hand, was all about degrees; shadings of impairment” (172). Conflicts between these two systems of understanding and their vocabularies unfolded in the courtroom. While at the beginning of the period under examination judges and legal authorities resisted using the crime as evidence of insanity and therefore as a pathway to excuse, Eigen’s book demonstrates that there was consensus about the diagnosis of homicidal mania by the beginning of the twentieth century.

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