Litigating Mind: The Ambiguities of Medical Expertise in Nineteenth-Century Common Law

This talk will analyze one of the most vexing areas of common law adjudication during the nineteenth century – disputes regarding an individual’s possible unsoundness of mind – and explore the role of physician testimony in such disputes. Called in as experts able to provide evidence about the human mind and its pathologies, mental scientists found their pronouncements lumped in with, and accorded little better treatment than, the eyewitness accounts of family members, servants, tradespeople, and anyone else deemed to have relevant knowledge about the behavior of the individual at issue. Scientific evidence did not disappear, as a result, but it rarely gained the kind of authoritative sway we have come to assume science had over the public by the nineteenth century.