Mad-Doctors in the Dock: Defending the Diagnosis, 1760-1913

Shortly before she pushed her infant daughter headfirst into a bucket of water and fastened the lid, Annie Cherry warmed the pail because, as she later explained to a police officer, “It would have been cruel to put her in cold water.” Afterwards, this mother sat down and poured herself a cup of tea. At Cherry’s trial at the Old Bailey in 1877, Henry Charlton Bastian, physician to the National Hospital for the Paralyzed an...