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Review Essay: Surgeons at the Bar: From the Crime Scene to the Courtroom

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 February 2022

Joel Peter Eigen
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Extract

How did English and Welsh medical practitioners enter the common-law courtroom as expert witnesses, and how can one assess their influence on crime-scene investigations and courtroom testimony? Witnesses offering specialist opinions were hardly novel in the eighteenth-century London courtroom, but their participation grew at such a pace that, by the early 1900s, they had become regular participants in police investigation and criminal trials. Even as their presence grew, their evolution was not a singular event: defense lawyers, judges, and juries were experiencing qualitative changes in their roles in the adjudication of crime just as prison surgeons, asylum superintendents, and hospital medical officers entered the witness box. It is the singular achievement of this important study that Katherine D. Watson has isolated critical moments in the growth of medicine's role while embedding the practitioners’ rise within the shifting dynamics of criminal prosecution in early modern England.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , November 2021 , pp. 867 - 873
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Society for Legal History

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References

1. For these and other questions posed by the author, see Watson, Katherine D., Medicine and Justice: Medico-Legal Practice in England and Wales, 1700–1914 (London: Routledge, 2020), 12Google Scholar.

2. Ibid., 100–103.

3. Ibid., 15.

4. See generally ibid., 199–221.

5. Ibid., 53, 169–70.

6. Ibid., 171.

7. Ibid., 175.

8. Watson, Katherine D., Poisoned Lives: English Poisoners and Their Victims (London: Hambledon, 2004)Google Scholar.

9. For the geographical range of the study, see Watson, Medicine and Justice, 13–14.

10. Green, Thomas Andrew, Verdict According to Conscience: Perspectives on the English Criminal Trial, 1200–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, l985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11. Eigen, Joel Peter, “Lesion of the Will: Medical Resolve and Criminal Responsibility in Victorian Insanity Trials,” Law & Society Review 33 (1999), 441CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

12. Watson, Medicine and Justice, 154.

13. See generally Eigen, Joel Peter, Mad-Doctors in the Dock: Defending the Diagnosis, 1760–1913 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 174–79Google Scholar.

14. For the former quote, see Watson, Medicine and Justice, 181. For the latter, see Eigen, Joel Peter, Witnessing Insanity: Madness and Mad-Doctors in the English Court (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 43Google Scholar.

15. Old Bailey Sessions Papers, 5th session (May 1801), 320.