Murder and madness: medicine, law, and society in the fin de siècle

the three chapters on "the species question" in the decades before Darwin. Here the discussion leaves the roads well-trampled by historians of evolution, and brings to light many important but hitherto unread works that bear directly on the question. He emphasizes the importance of continental discussions of the origin of species, thus connecting this study with his recent The age of Lamarck (1989). Just how widely read these continental works were remains debatable, and in general the audiences for the texts dealt with here could benefit from further discussion. Certainly the French and German texts had an effect on key figures like Lyell and Powell himself. Further attention to the medical world-the subject of Adrian Desmond's Politics of evolution-would support Corsi's insistence on what he calls "the French threat". Science and religion sets a new standard of historical sophistication for its subject. It provides a much-needed picture of a major figure, and illuminates wider debates about philosophy, science, and faith. This book represents a major contribution to the history of forensic medicine and the sexual stereotyping of men and women late in the nineteenth century, both within medicine and in society generally. It is an Oxford doctoral thesis, inspired by Roger Smith's pioneering Trial by medicine: insanity and responsibility in Victorian trials (1981). Some readers may find objectionable the author's feminist interpretations of psychiatrists' motives, especially the conclusion which speculates that medical willingness to view female patients and female criminals as biologically-driven minors was a response to the eruption of feminism in late nineteenth-century France. But the book's painstaking analysis of dozens of cases from the Paris courts over the period 1880 to 1910 gives it an authoritative tone that will not easily be challenged. Harris's argument is that the courts' classic imputation to the accused of responsibility and rationality, and the measured weighing out of retribution, were overturned by the rise of the first biological psychiatry in the nineteenth century, a rise to which Jean-Martin Charcot, a non-psychiatrist, contributed with his theories of hysteria. This "first" biological psychiatry (not Harris's phrase) saw women in particular as driven by the force of Nature, especially by their easily excitable nervous systems, rather than by reason. Consequently, psychiatric opinions in court heavily emphasized "hysteria" and "degeneration" as explanations for female crimes of passion, and the female defendants were almost invariably acquitted. Thus it is fair to speak of a certain "medicalization of …