Delusion in the courtroom: the role of partial insanity in early forensic testimony.

Standing in the dock at the OldBailey in 1833, Noah Pease Folger, Captain of the Sophia, seemed the soul of propriety. "No man was more kind hearted and human . . .", testified another ship's captain, who saw Folger three weeks before he attempted to kill Mr Mellish, the owner of the Sophia. Certainly "kind hearted and human" persons, if brought to the point of rage, had been known to commit acts of the most inhuman barbarity, yet Folger evinced a singular sort of distraction. His disorder, the jury was told, only began "when the subject which caused his malady was raised . . . he was quite calm and collected till Mr. Mellish's name came into question". In his moments of deep derangement, the Captain of the Sophia had been known to break window panes with his bare fists, dance on the broken glass, strip naked, and complete the episode by jumping on the back of a passing whale. With such a vividly illustrated history of madness, why should there have been any question regarding his plea of insanity? Although the captain's antics may strike the twentieth-century reader as persuasive grounds for a defence of insanity, the legal stricture of total madness as the criterion for an acquittal meant that it was actually the captain's rational moments which were on trial; for example, his confession immediately following arrest-"I shot him, I know the laws ofmy country and I shall be hung for it". Jurors also heard reports of the captain's self-composure when he forgot about the torments he attributed to his nemesis. Without a conception of the mind which allowed for the possibility of limited, circumscribed seats of madness, the captain's equanimity on his smooth-sailing days might well have militated against an acquittal. How was the jury in the Folger case, and in similar trials heard in London in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, brought to an understanding of the possibility of hidden madness in the mind of an otherwise reasonable person? Contemporary efforts to capture how inhabitants of earlier historical periods conceived of the mind of the mad have drawn on a variety of sources, and include scholarly investigations of the history of ideas and thought systems, medical tracts published by madhouse keepers and mad-doctors, and in a few instances, memoirs of recovered melancholics. Of continuing interest in this historical endeavour has been the effort to discern fundamental shifts and refinements in the conceptualization of