Preliminary Programme

The rise of the Roman-canon inquisitorial procedure throughout sixteenth-century continental Europe is often regarded as an important milestone in the development of legal medicine. The inquisitorial emphasis on the prosecution of crime by public officials and the rational investigation of the facts by the penal judge implied an adherence to very strict standards of proof, which eventually gave birth to a necessity on the part of judges to consult experts in a growing number of cases. Previous research has already pointed out that among the various groups of experts which appeared in early modern courts, medical practitioners were in fact the most frequently consulted category. Focusing on Ghent, the de facto capital of the County of Flanders (a principality comprising the present-day Belgian provinces of West- and East-Flanders, together with parts of Northern France), this contribution will give an overview of the manifold forms of collaboration between legal authorities (particularly the bench of aldermen of the Ghent Keure) and medical practitioners from the late sixteenth century onwards, when medico-legal expertise gradually became incorporated in Flemish criminal justice. First and foremost, medical practitioners were required to conduct post-mortems in order to inform the authorities on the nature of suspicious deaths. Drawing on a collection of post-mortem reports spanning the last decades of the sixteenth century and the entire seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some major developments in the description and analysis of violent death will be pointed out, from the relatively summary and selective external examinations at the start of the period to the thorough and systematic autopsies of the eighteenth century. While the performance of post-mortems was the exclusive domain of a restricted number of town physicians and surgeons, all medical practitioners could be involved in a second form of “medical policing”. In 1615, an ordinance of the Ghent aldermen required all surgeons operating within the city to report every injury they treated, together with an assessment of the potential lethality of these wounds. In this way, the local authorities and medical practitioners collaborated in an effort to curb violence in the streets and to promote the ex officio prosecution of violent crime over acts of private revenge. Early modern medical practitioners were, however, not only involved in legal controversies concerning the bodies of their fellow townsmen, but were also asked to pronounce on matters concerning mental health. Suppliants who submitted a petition to the Ghent aldermen for the collocation of an unruly family member made avid use of attestations of medical practitioners (in most cases physicians, but sometimes also surgeons) validating the insanity of the person in question. Medical evaluations of insanity were however much more controversial than other forms of medical expertise, as the aldermen always took care of obtaining a second opinion by the town physicians before deciding to collocate alleged lunatics. (Show less)

Histories of psychology often give much attention to the late nineteenth century, when psychology was established as an experimental science. This experimental psychology had an important impact on the procedures of criminal justice: the psychology of memory and witnessing and, especially in the US, the development of the ‘lie detector’ altered the ways in which police officers, judges and juries gathered and evaluated evidence and decided on innocence or guilt. Remarkably little attention has been given, however, to psychological knowledge in criminal justice before the late nineteenth century. In this paper, I seek to investigate this earlier history of psychological knowledge and its development and use in French and German criminal interrogations between 1750 and 1850. To do so, I study intellectual treatises on the human mind in tandem with laws and regulations, legal manuals and interrogation transcripts.

By the late eighteenth century, judicial torture had become problematic, if not prohibited, in most French and German criminal courts, and the old ‘law of proof’ had lost its lustre. As a result, magistrates sought new ways to gather and evaluate evidence, and they started to focus on the mind of the suspect. By the early nineteenth century, in the German regions, several dedicated manuals were written on how to use psychological knowledge in criminal justice. While French manuals were less explicit, they also offered insights on how to ‘read’ suspects’ bodies, how to discover lies and how to convince suspects to confess. In interrogation transcripts, too, these new techniques became visible.

This paper will analyse where the psychological knowledge proposed by manuals and used by magistrates came from and how it related to other forms of psychological knowledge, for instance in intellectual culture or among common suspects. I will show that magistrates’ psychologies were innovative and that psychological knowledge was often developed in practice rather than in academies, in interaction with suspects rather than simply from above. I will analyse varying psychological assumptions of philosophers, magistrates and suspects and highlight differences and dialogues between social groups and settings. This will allow us to rethink the history of psychology and its applications in criminal justice. Just as changing psychological knowledges brought about criminal justice reforms, legal developments also affected the history of psychological knowledge. (Show less)

During the twentieth century, many scientific notions coined by psychiatry, such as ‘psychopathy’, ‘insanity’, ‘hysteria’, and ‘depression’, became stock parts of lay vocabulary. In the courtroom, however, this may have led to debate and unclarity, among lay people such as lawyers and judges claiming to understand these terms, as well as among the psychiatrists who acted as expert witnesses.

This paper will examine the relationship between lay and expert use of psychiatric notions in Dutch cases of infanticide between 1930 and 1960. In cases of infanticide, mothers are accused of murdering their new-born babies. Often, one of the questions raised during these trials was whether the mother was insane at the moment of the crime, and thus (partially) unaccountable. Specifically, psychiatrists referred to the existence of ‘puerperal insanity’, a temporary insanity the mother would experience directly after childbirth. In addition, psychoanalytically inclined psychiatrists pointed to feelings of fear triggered in the mother after having a baby: fear of death, but also sadistic destruction drives leading to emptiness or disillusionment (because of loss of sexual drives and attraction).

All of these psychiatric concepts border on common lay knowledge of emotions such as fear, aggression and melancholy, as well as on lay conceptions of insanity. This paper will explore to what extent psychiatric concepts were really seen as scientific, only to be interpreted by psychiatrists, or, rather, converted into a lay vocabulary on emotion? To answer this question, attention needs to be paid to the Dutch scientific and broader cultural contexts. Not only the influence of psychoanalysis on forensic psychiatry needs to be taken into account, but also the broadly shared respect for authority in the Netherlands in this period. The question is, however, whether this respect also applied to psychiatric experts in the courtroom. Based on textbooks of forensic psychiatry, court records and newspapers, the tensions between lay and expert knowledge on the mind and emotions will be mapped. (Show less)

In many penal procedures for infanticide and abortion in post-war Spain there was a question that acquired a special juridical relevance: the question what a woman could know about her own pregnancy and delivery. The main case in which this question surfaced was when the accused claimed that she did not know she was pregnant, or that she had not been aware that a certain vaginal expulsion was a delivery. The question also appeared when the categorisation under law required to determine whether the accused had only neglected to give care (qualifying for the crime of “abandonment of children”) or whether they had committed a certain action with the intention of killing (qualifying as “infanticide”). These alternatives arose, for example, when in autopsies, experts found that the causes of death of the foetuses were the cold or exsanguination due to the section of the umbilical cord.

In many cases, the question of a supposed mother’s competence and knowledge was not only a juridical problem, but also a problem that the medical expert witnesses turned into an object of scientific inquiry. What women could know about their own pregnancy and delivery was, in fact, a problem that was mentioned in many handbooks on forensic medicine in Spain, starting with the foundational one by Pedro Mata, first published in the mid-nineteenth century but re-edited and read throughout the twentieth century. But the application of such theorical insights in courtrooms has not been analysed. This is a gap that this paper aims to explore.

Specific penal procedures in the context of the Franco Regime could give more credit to witnesses’ testimonies, affecting the differential evaluation of expert reports by the judges. First, there was an elevated incidence of denunciations and accusations both promoted by the authorities and as spontaneous ways of collaborating with the regime, and second, moral and behaviour reports about the accused were usually commanded by the examining judges to the local authorities, the police, or local priests. As a result, in cases of infanticide and abortion, female neighbours’ testimonies had great impact on the judge’s sentence if they discredited the accused women from a moral perspective. But did these lay testimonies substitute or compete with experts’ discussing mother’s competence and knowledge?

All the above questions will be examined in this paper with an approach that combines the perspectives of the history of science and of the history of penal procedural law. But considerations from a social history of professions point of view will also be relevant. In this way, there is a broader question that it seeks to explore: what was the relation between the scientific activity of determining a mother’s competence and knowledge and the criteria of disciplinary demarcation held by forensic doctors, generalist practitioners, and gynaecologists? Thus, this analysis will explore whether efforts to monopolise certain fields of knowledge shaped, or were the basis of, scientific activities in regard to the mother’s competence and knowledge in penal procedures. (Show less)

The administrative reforms during the 19th century appear as crucial elements of founding the modern state apparatus in the late Ottoman Empire. While Ottoman Empire became part of international police cooperation with The International Conference of Rome for the Social Defense Against Anarchists (November 24 - December 21, 1898) and Saint Petersburg Protocol (1904), Ottoman Government was also eager to use new technologies in policing. As part of this process, the use of photographs for purposes of identification created new document types for police departments and prisons in the late Ottoman Empire. This paper will discuss the knowledge exchange in Billion system with the use of photographs as policing technics by Ottoman police departments and how these photographs circulated between different police departments internationally. (Show less)