Dying for work: workers' safety and health in twentieth century America

and titular head of the League. This sensational murder involved the Spanish psychiatric community, as medical experts for both defence and prosecution, and as commentators for a shocked public. One of the latter was Gonzalo R. Lafora, whose archives on the Hildegart case and that ofGregorio C'ardenas, a Mexican serial killer, provide the raw material for this excellent study of forensic psychiatry and the social construction of madness. The authors offer a Foucaultian analysis of the relationship between psychiatry and ideology, when the focus is the line that divides madness and criminality. Like Foucault, they are concerned to illuminate the ways in which psychiatric doctrine is implicated in the mechanisms of power. The Hildegart case is the perfect medium for such an analysis, because the defence experts Sacristan and Prados, political liberals operating within a psychoanalytic domain, argued Aurora's madness, while the prosecution team, the conservative nationalists Vallejo and Piga, sought to establish her rationality. The root issues, of the perpetrator's responsibility and her threat to society, were those around which forensic psychiatry evolved in nineteenth-century France, as the authors explain. As Aurora's trial proceeded, it became clear that the experts on both sides had difficulty in distinguishing the defendant's anarchist ideology from the ostensible disease, paranoia. Sacrist'an, following Kraepelin, further specified that Aurora suffered from megalomania, "subgroup social reformism" ("eugenic delirium", said Prados), a revealing diagnosis inasmuch as Sacristan, a member of the League for Sexual Reform, could well have been reckoned a follower of Aurora! Her danger to society was proved by her "aggressive" personality, and her antisocial behaviour in prison (she protested the conditions) was further proof of her illness. The authors observe that men holding similar views were not deemed aggressive; and that Aurora's advocacy of limiting male procreation to a three-year period by "temporary vasectomies" was patent evidence of madness/criminality to all male commentators, of whatever political persuasion. Right-wing newspapers seconded the prosecution's intimations that political extremism was the source of Aurora's depravity. On an analytical level, perhaps the most important contribution of Alvarez and Huertas is their discussion of the interaction between psychoanalysis and Lombrosian biological determinism in the approach of Spanish psychiatrists to criminality and madness. Crime, by this dual criterion, was associated with both regressivity (in the social-Darwinian sense) and neurosis. Moreover, there was a perfect fit between the two approaches: psychoanalysts held that neurosis and criminality had a common source in infantile sexuality and the "beast" within, struggling against prohibited desires, notions easily related to Lombroso's conception of a criminal as a savage throwback to an earlier state of human society. Indeed, the authors could have clinched their argument with greater emphasis on Freud's Darwinian anthropology, replete as it was with recapitulationist logic. That psychoanalysis stimulated forensic psychiatry by providing a battery of theories and practical tests is amply demonstrated. Sacristan's Rorschach results on Aurora and Lafora's on Cardenas (both reproduced) make clear the psychoanalytic interpretations of both psychiatrists, neither of whom were orthodox Feudians.