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** This is an archived, static copy of the Casebook messages boards dating from 1998 to 2003. These threads cannot be replied to here. If you want to participate in our current forums please go to https://forum.casebook.org **
Insane students
Casebook Message Boards: General Discussion: Miscellaneous:
Insane students
Author: Philip Rayner
Sunday, 12 January 2003 - 07:32 am |        | Has anyone, like myself, ever wondered about the three insane medical students who were suspected early on.
I am not proposing them as suspects, nor am I attempting to open the can of worms already running on another thread.
It just strikes me as a very weird description for many reasons. It is said in a very matter of fact way as if this were a perfectly normal state of affairs for medical students. These students also seem to be the same age so are the police saying that three students who went to the same school of medicine at the same time independantly became insane? What was the nature of the insanity ie what did they do to be given that title? Did they become insane due to the work they were asked to do or the conditions in the East end?
Maybe this is one of those endless Victorian euphemisms. In order to be put in an asylum you just had to be a single mom in those days so the acts that showed them to be insane could be anything.
Any insights ladies and gents.
Phil |
Author: Brian Schoeneman
Sunday, 12 January 2003 - 11:21 am | | Philip,
I have always wondered the same thing, because I think that a medical student living in or around Whitechapel and studying at the London Hospital would fit the profile I have in my head of the killer quite nicely.
However, and this is only my personal opinion, when I read that they were considered "insane", I thought it was meant more as a refernce to homosexuality, rather than legitimate mental illness.
B |
Author: Philip Rayner
Monday, 13 January 2003 - 02:22 pm | | | I tend to agree, any reference to homosexuality was probably taboo. Maybe it was so common to use the word insane that any Victorian would know what it covered. |
Author: Chris Phillips
Monday, 13 January 2003 - 04:07 pm | | Brian Schoeneman wrote:
However, and this is only my personal opinion, when I read that they were considered "insane", I thought it was meant more as a refernce to homosexuality, rather than legitimate mental illness.
I'm still sceptical about the interpretation of Macnaghten's "sexual insanity" as homosexuality, but in any case I can't believe that the simple term "insanity" would be used for homosexuality.
I happen to have a Victorian encyclopaedia published in 1879, with half a page on "Insanity", detailing various classifications that had been proposed (some of them by Drs Bucknill and Tuke - the latter, if I remember correctly, later ran the asylum where Montague Druitt's mother died). There is no mention of anything sexual at all, let alone homosexuality.
The closest seems to be the 4th classification (out of 5) by Bucknill and Tuke:
... emotional Insanity, or morbid states of the emotions without delusion, whether of a melancholy character (Melancholia simplex), or of an exalted character (partial exaltation; the affective monomania of Esquirol), or whether marked by a perverted moral sense, or by impulses chiefly of a destructive character (Homicidal Insanity, &c without delusion or mental weakness; instinctive monomania of Esquirol), constituting moral or emotional Insanity proper.
Make of that what you will!
But I suspect Victorian psychologists were of necessity not prudes, and the detailed nature of these classifications should probably give us hope that Macnaghten's "sexual insanity" meant something reasonably definite to his readers - and perhaps can do to us as well.
Incidentally, the third of these insane students - the last one to be tracked down, has his own discussion board, where you can find more details:
Ripper Suspects: General Discussion : Sanders, John William Smith (1862-1901) |
Author: Philip Rayner
Monday, 13 January 2003 - 04:18 pm | | This is not a clinical analysis, but would this be something similar to a manic depressive perhaps?
Phil |
Author: Brian Schoeneman
Monday, 13 January 2003 - 04:40 pm | | Chris,
Was there a heading of "sexual insanity" in there? I'd be interested to read what the book said about that.
B |
Author: Chris Phillips
Monday, 13 January 2003 - 04:44 pm | | No - no "sexual insanity" - I was specially on the lookout for that.
It was a half-page summary of the prevalent classifications. I suspect more useful material could be found in Victorian works on psychology. |
Author: Timsta
Monday, 13 January 2003 - 04:45 pm | | Chris:
Victorian psychologists may not have been prudes, but they were pretty whacked out. Note the almost identical diagnoses of "hysteria" and "nymphomania" as applied to women, for example.
Regards
Timsta |
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