The crime was the disease
Mike Jay: ‘Mad-Doctors in the Dock’, 15 June 2017
Mad-Doctors in the Dock: Defending the Diagnosis, 1760-1913
by Joel Peter Eigen.
Johns Hopkins, 206 pp., £29.50, September 2016,978 1 4214 2048 6 Show More
by Joel Peter Eigen.
Johns Hopkins, 206 pp., £29.50, September 2016,
“... no more than grist for the learned disputations of the experts. Eigen’s starting date of 1760 marks the first time that specialist medical evidence was summoned to adjudicate insanity in an English courtroom, but the case that really launches his narrative is that of James Hadfield, who on 15 May 1800 was arrested in the Drury Lane Theatre after firing a ... ”