Skip Navigation

Social History of Medicine 1998 11(3):361-380; doi:10.1093/shm/11.3.361
© 1998 by Society for the Social History of Medicine
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrow Search for citing articles in:
ISI Web of Science (5)
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by JACKSON, M.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

Articles

‘It Begins with the Goose and Ends with the Goose’: Medical, Legal, and Lay Understandings of Imbecility in Ingram v Wyatt, 1824–1832

MARK JACKSON*

*Centre for Medical History, University of Exeter Amory Building, Rennes Drive, Exeter EX4 4RJ, UK.

SUMMARY A number of historians have recently suggested that we need to get out of the asylum if we are to fully understand attitudes to insanity in the nineteenth century. Arguing that accounts of the medicalization of madness have ignored the importance of non-medical attitudes to lunacy and idiocy, recent studies have stressed the need to explore family attitudes and responses in more detail. Unfortunately, efforts to escape the asylum have to some extent been hampered by a persistent reliance on institutional records. This institutional dependence is understandable: certificates of insanity, reception orders, case-books, and asylum registers, together with published documents, constitute the major record of historical constructions of the lunatic and idiotic mind. However, there may be more resourceful ways of exploring both medical and non-medical attitudes to idiocy. In this paper, I want to use the records from a contested will case, Ingram v Wyatt, to demonstrate that records from the ecclesiastical courts can provide access to a domain where the definitions and meanings of idiocy and imbecility were routinely considered by lawyers, lay witnesses, judges, and doctors. I shall argue that such cases constitute a fruitful site for excavating lay, professional legal, and medical attitudes to imbecility, for exploring the complex relationship between medical and non-medical understandings of capacity, and for situating those understandings within the context of professional developments in law and medicine and contemporary concerns about inheritance.

Keywords: history of insanity; imbecility; law; medicine; lay attitudes to imbecility; determination of mental competence; ecclesiastical court records


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?


This article has been cited by other articles:


Home page
 History of PsychiatryHome page
J. E. Moran
The Signal and the Noise: The Historical Epidemiology of Insanity in Ante-Bellum New Jersey
History of Psychiatry, September 1, 2003; 14(3): 281 - 301.
[Abstract] [PDF]


Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.