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,
“... The 13th-century jurist Henri de Bracton, who formalised the growing body of case law under Henry III, had stressed that ‘in misdeeds we look to the will and not the outcome,’ and consequently ‘a madman is not liable.’ From this point on, madness was defined by legal concepts such as mens rea (guilty intention) and non compos mentis (unsound ... ”