Mental Ability and the Birth of Medical Jurisprudence

During my time at the MPIWG I propose to work on two research projects. First, I will pursue investigations related to my ongoing project, “Mental Ability and the Birth of Medical Jurisprudence.” Positioned at the intersection of the natural sciences and the human sciences, the purpose of this project is to investigate the relations between the medical and legal communities that developed during the nineteenth century around the issue of individual mental ability and competency, focusing in particular on the concept of idiocy.  During the first decades of the nineteenth century, an extraordinary transformation took place in Anglo-American adjudications around the issue of mental competency.  Challenging strict common law standards minimizing occasions where an actor’s ability to make a will, enter into a contract, get married, or the like could be placed in question, physicians and jurists in both nations sought, often successfully, to introduce more capacious understandings of impairments that might render an individual unable to manage his or her affairs. 

For all the similarity in goals, however, the relations between doctors and lawyers—and more broadly between medicine and the law—in this project were anything but easy, as each profession jealously guarded its own prerogatives and proved suspicious of expertise drawn from other quarters.  At the same time, the practical necessities involved in remaking notions of, and practices around, mental deficit and diminished responsibility often encouraged each community to cooperate as well as spar with the other.  In this project I examine this tangle of contradictory tendencies and motives by analyzing the very different languages of mental deficiency and personal agency that evolved within the legal and medical worlds during the nineteenth century.  Central to my investigation is concern with the complicated ways in which concepts in one community were both connected to, and differentiated from, those in the other, and how each of these languages was particularized when applied by a variety of actors—including physicians, mental philosophers, asylum keepers, lawyers, judges, and legislators—to concrete situations and living individuals.  My goal is to understand the process by which individuals were categorized according to their mental ability, the meaning of such categorizations when applied to specific situations, and the means by which knowledge generated and expertise validated in one context could, or could not, become persuasive within the other.