| dc.description.abstract | This thesis investigates the ways in which hereditary degeneration was discussed by
Scottish psychiatrists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with
particular reference to the anti-alcohol debate. I examine the theoretical writings of
both clinical and forensic psychiatry to show how the theory of degeneration
functioned as part of a new understanding of legal medicine and that psychiatric
knowledge was always implicitly related to a broader conception of criminal capacity
and the role of the modern state. While the argument is situated in the wider literature
covering psychiatry and degeneration in Europe and America during the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I trace a rather singular story rooted in the
institutional peculiarities of Scotland, showing how psychiatrists attempted to use the
problem of alcoholic degeneration to mould their science into a branch of public
health, propelling them into their preferred role as guardians of the race.
This public health campaign facilitated the creation of new categories of
psychiatric knowledge consisting of mental abnormalities that did not amount to
absolute insanity, but that none the less had a bearing on how people thought about
the mind, conduct, and criminal capacity. All the leading figures of Scottish
psychiatry had a significant interest in alcohol as a cause of degeneration, and in their
descriptions of the condition, the legal applications of the doctrine were never from
view. One reason for this was undoubtedly the autonomous nature of the Scottish
legal system which, when combined with the relatively small professional population
of Scotland, greatly increased the rate of intellectual exchange between psychiatrists
and lawyers while intensifying the political implications of associating with certain
doctrines. Thus, a large part of my thesis will also be devoted to the legal
interpretation of psychiatric claims, and in later part of the thesis I examine in depth
the extent to which psychiatric knowledge claims were able to modify the laws of
Scotland. Three substantive themes protrude from the documents consulted: Heredity,
degeneration and alcohol, and medico-legal interaction. In analysing these themes, I
engage with specific aspects of the social and institutional life of Scottish psychiatrists
in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. | en |
