This project was created in partnership with the completion of my master's thesis entitled "'A Mother-Specific Disorder for a Mother-Specific Crime': Alienists, Infanticide and Puerperal Insanity in Nineteenth-Century Britain" at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2020.

 

This website's purpose is to track the journey female patients took to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum during the nineteenth century. The project looks specifically at women accused of infanticide and found to be insane and outlines case studies that cover a wide range of experiences. By documenting a variety of journeys, this project investigates how the medical, legal, and broader society understood these women and their crimes.

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This website presents the long journey many women took to the doors of Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, England's first specialized institution for criminal lunatics. The project draws from genealogy databases, contemporary newspapers, and court records to track the lives of women admitted to Broadmoor Asylum between 1863-1900. Utilizing maps to display the journeys of female patients indicted for infanticide, this project offers a new way of presenting and understanding the history of infanticide in Victorian Britain. Each case study outlines the background, crime, inquest, and trial of each woman, as well as their confinement at Broadmoor. While my thesis focused on the role of professional communities in infanticide trials during the nineteenth century, this website offers insight into each woman's journey to better understand her experience through the legal and psychiatric systems in Britain.

 

Disclosure: the terms "insanity" and "madness" has been used when discussing mental illness in the nineteenth century. These have been used as they were commonly used in contemporary discussions on mental illness in the medical, legal, and broader community.

 

Laura Burgess

The University of North Carolina at Charlotte

MA History Student