Jackson M
Centre for Medical History, University of Exeter, UK.
Soc Hist Med. 1998 Dec;11(3):361-80. doi: 10.1093/shm/11.3.361.
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.
一些历史学家最近提出，如果我们要全面理解19世纪对精神错乱的态度，就需要走出精神病院。近期的研究认为，关于疯狂医学化的描述忽略了对精神错乱和白痴的非医学态度的重要性，强调有必要更详细地探究家庭态度和反应。不幸的是，对机构记录的持续依赖在一定程度上阻碍了摆脱精神病院研究范畴的努力。这种对机构的依赖是可以理解的：精神病证明、收容令、病例簿、精神病院登记册以及已发表的文件，共同构成了对疯子和白痴心理的历史建构的主要记录。然而，可能有更有效的方法来探究对白痴的医学和非医学态度。在本文中，我想利用一个遗嘱争议案件——英格拉姆诉怀亚特案的记录，来证明教会法庭的记录能够让我们接触到一个领域，在这个领域中，律师、外行证人、法官和医生经常会思考白痴和低能的定义及含义。我将论证，这类案件是挖掘外行、专业法律人士和医学人士对低能的态度、探究医学和非医学对行为能力理解之间复杂关系，以及将这些理解置于法律和医学专业发展背景以及当代对继承问题关注之中的一个富有成果的场所。
