![]() ![]() ![]() Likewise they were only partially successful, and indeed committed, in arguing for the expansion of the insanity defence in cases of incendiarism. But the majority of later nineteenth-century Anglo-American medical jurisprudence and medico-psychological texts on crime and insanity repeatedly and emphatically questioned the legitimacy of pyromania. The studies by Whitlock (1999) and by Abelson (1989) make it clear that kleptomania remained a controversial diagnosis and insanity defence. Of course, such lexicographic texts were rarely compiled by medico-legal experts, and can only be seen as limited reflections of the complexities and shifts in the more detailed debates in specialist literature. 4 Vice versa, dipsomania and kleptomania were not uncommonly recognized with larger entries and as definitive forms of insanity, the latter generally linked to irresistible impulse and/or to underlying congenital, organic disease (e.g. Richard Quain’s medical dictionary was categorical that pyromania’s ‘claim to be regarded as a special form of insanity has not been established’ ( Quain, 1890, Vol. Cleaveland, 1872: 202 Fowler, 1875: 420), 3 by the 1880s and 1890s medical lexicons were registering pyromania’s claim for special status as just a ‘claim’, according it cursory treatment and often eschewing reference to irresistible impulse. Although some texts continued to present pyromania as a species of impulsive ‘insanity, with an irresistible desire to destroy by fire’ (e.g. 2 In later editions of this text, pyromania remained a merely ‘supposed species of moral insanity’, while by contrast dipsomania was readily deemed ‘a disease’, and kleptomania was, contrariwise, newly glossed as ‘a now recognised species of moral insanity, actuating the subject of it to pilfer and steal’ (e.g. Emphasizing that pyromania’s ‘existence … is by some denied’, Mayne defined kleptomania in the same terms and dipsomania as a ‘vice’ rather than a ‘disease’ ( Mayne, 1860: 559, 1054). While signalling partial acceptance of pyromania as ‘a supposed species of moral insanity, believed to actuate incendiaries’, Robert Grey Mayne’s 1860 Lexicon, for example, signified the merely putative status of such definitions. A number preferred to classify it subsumed within more general definitions of mental derangement. Post-1850, British, European and US medico-legal authorities were often quite significantly divided over the applicability and essential properties of pyromania, and the extent to which they accepted (like Esquirol and Ray) that pyromania was a distinct disorder. Deepening doubts about pyromania as a special or distinct insanity ![]()
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