Book Review: Mad-doctors in the dock: Defending the diagnosis, 1760–1913

• DOI: 10.1177/1057567717710996
• Date: 01 September 2017
• Published date: 01 September 2017
• Author: Sofia Wikman
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Joel, P. E. (2016).

Mad-doctors in the dock: Defending the diagnosis, 1760–1913. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press,

224 pp. $40.00, ISBN 142142049x.

Reviewed by: Sofia Wikman, Department of Criminology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

DOI: 10.1177/1057567717710996

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 medicopsycho-

logical 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 En glish 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

International CriminalJustice Review

2017, Vol. 27(3) 222-231

ª2017 Georgia State University

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