Delusion's odyssey: charting the course of Victorian forensic psychiatry.

To any observer standing in the 1859 London courtroom, the case of John Francis for the willful murder of fellow prisoner Thomas Hall must have seemed a rather run-of-the-mill insanity trial. After supplying the court with a narrative of the events leading up to the killing, the defense attorney called an array of character and medical witnesses who attested to the accused’s tragic history of family lunacy and personal years of manic hysteria. Under the care of a medical officer when confined on board a hospital ship, the defendant had bremained insane during the whole of that period . . . laboring under the delusion that someone intended to do him some personal injury.Q With a documented history of confinement, vivid tales of family derangement, and medical testimony that employed delusion—the most frequently invoked courtroom term to define Victorian insanity—there seemed little to distinguish the trial of John Francis from that of other allegedly insane men and women who appeared at the Old Bailey, London’s central criminal court. Little, that is, until the prosecutor elected to call a medical witness to rebut the medical man’s characterization of the defendant as delusional. The state’s surprise witness was Alexander John Sutherland, who, bby the direction of the GovernmentQ visited Francis in Newgate jail bwith a view to ascertain. . . the state of his mind.Q Asked by the prosecutor to comment on the bfacts provedQ (i.e., the evidence) at trial, Dr. Sutherland was immediately kept from speaking by Judge Baron Alderson, who bobjected to the judgment of the witness being substituted for that of the Jury.Q The prosecutor rephrased the question: bUpon the facts that have been proven . . . are you enabled to form any