Murders and Madness: Medicine, Law, and Society in the Fin de Siècle (Oxford Historical Monographs) - Softcover

Harris, Ruth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0198202598 ISBN 13: 9780198202592

Publisher: Clarendon Press, 1991

Synopsis

This is an interdisciplinary study of the debate on crime and madness in France between 1880 and 1914. Harris argues that the traditional bases of the French penal system were undermined at the time by psychiatric theories of human behavior and new sociological interpretations of crime, which challenged legal concepts of free will and moral responsibility. The book also examines the evolution of a new kind of knowledge, and shows how the politique criminelle envisaged by specialists was the result of the interaction among the bureaucratic culture of the magistrates, the clinical and scientific world of the psychiatrists, and the background of the defendants.

About this title

About the Author:

Ruth Harris is Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at New College, Oxford.

Review:

'a meticulously researched study of medico-legal debates in nineteenth-century France' History Workshop Journal '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' Medical History `Harris has written a useful, compendious, suggestive, often sensitive book.' Times Literary Supplement 'a meticulously researched study of medico-legal debates in nineteenth-century France' History Workshop Journal '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' Medical History `Harris has written a useful, compendious, suggestive, often sensitive book.' Times Literary Supplement `an intelligent and well-researched study' British Journal of Criminology `a useful, compendious, suggestive, often sensitive book' Times Literary Supplement

About this edition

• Publisher: Clarendon Press
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0198202598
• ISBN 13: 9780198202592
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384