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

Harris, Ruth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198229917 ISBN 13: 9780198229919

Publisher: Clarendon Press, 1989

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:

"Harris has written a useful, compendious, suggestive, often sensitive book."

--Times Literary Supplement

"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"

--Edward Shorter, University of Toronto, Medical History

"Harris pushes beyond an analysis of existing scholarship to mine a rich vein of relevant but little-used primary source material: the official dossiers and records of murder cases at the Assizes court in Paris during the period from 1880 to 1910 ... Harris has written a fascinating and
valuable book."

--Edward J. Larson, University of Georgia, Journal of the British Society for the History of Science

"a meticulously researched study of medico-legal debates in nineteenth-century France"

--History Workshop Journal

"From this work one gains useful insights into the workings of the French legal system. This information is valuable and marks another step in the evolution of a Foucault-influenced historiography."

--Sharif Gemie, Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education, Modern and Contemporary France, No.42 Oct '90

"an intelligent and well-researched study"

--British Journal of Criminology, Vol.30, No.4 Autumn '90

"This is a book of serious scholarship whose concentration of detail and frequently changing units of analysis demands discipline and concentration from it readers. Murder and Madness is an impressive achievement by any standard; an example, in my view, of social history of medicine at its
scholarly best."

--Anne Harrington, Harvard University, Social History of Medicine, Volume 3, Number 3, December 1990

"Harris's impressive ability to expound complex psychological, physiological and medicolegal debates makes this a fascinating monograph. She has a firm grasp of social history and offers a convincing analysis of the changing status of the medical profession."

--History

"elegantly researched and richly textured book ... this remains throughout a stimulating and imaginative book that should command the attention of cultural, social, and gender historians as well as historians of science and medicine."

--Jan Goldstein, University of Chiacgo, American Historical Review, December 1991

About this edition

• Publisher: Clarendon Press
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0198229917
• ISBN 13: 9780198229919
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 376