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" 'A Mother Specific Disorder for a Mother Specific Crime': "
Burgess, Laura Ann
Perry, Heather R.
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1114186
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| Doc. No
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TLpq2404412299
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| Main Entry
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Burgess, Laura Ann
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Perry, Heather R.
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| Title & Author
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'A Mother Specific Disorder for a Mother Specific Crime':\ Burgess, Laura AnnPerry, Heather R.
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| College
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The University of North Carolina at Charlotte
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| Date
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2020
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| student score
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2020
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| Degree
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M.A.
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| Page No
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121
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| Abstract
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From the early nineteenth century, the British medical community worked to redefine and reassert their professional space within society. During this process, medical men developed specific areas of focus and began to develop these into specialized subfields of medical knowledge. This thesis tracks how alienists – the self-ascribed term for early psychiatrists – established themselves as a recognized medical field by the end of the nineteenth century. Utilizing markers of specialization developed by historians George Rosen and George Weisz, this study analyzes how alienists asserted their specialized authority in two professional arenas: the medical field and the legal system. This study focuses on the development of puerperal insanity as a mental disorder and its connection to infanticide to outline how alienists met these markers of specialization by the close of the nineteenth century. This study is broken into three sections, as it tracks alienist’s professional development; firstly, in the medical field, secondly, the legal field, and thirdly, the medical/legal intersection at the specialized institution, Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. This thesis argues that alienists’ early development in the medical field assisted their professional extension into the legal arena, which in turn bolstered their continued, and eventually successful, claim to specialized authority over insanity by the start of the twentieth century. Focusing on puerperal insanity, this thesis analyzes its development by alienists and how it assisted them in defining their specialized role in the medical and legal community.
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British history
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Broadmoor Asylum
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History of medicine
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History of psychiatry
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Infanticide
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Victorian Britain
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