Inconvenient People (6 page)

He instructed all the ladies to withdraw when * * * was to be discussed, and they made it very clear that they objected to this eviction. Eventually they complied, but not before each woman had reserved her place by putting her gloves or shawl on her seat. Later, when the subject of abortion came up, they simply refused to shift from the room; the Commissioner told them that he was no longer prepared to make any effort to spare their ‘feelings’, therefore they could stay if they insisted. So they were present when during a spat between the two medics, Dr Haslam accused Dr Blundell of ‘making slips for married men’, a term that had to be explained in court as procuring an abortion for a woman who had been made pregnant by an adulterer. As abortion was still on the statutes as a hangable offence, Dr Blundell was allowed to take time to clear himself of the charge.

The superintendent of the Clapham Retreat, William Pollard, could hardly make himself heard above the jeering laughter that erupted throughout his testimony. Similar hilarity greeted much of Burrows’s evidence. He must have sensed which way the tide was running, as the doctor now claimed that he wanted rid of Edward from the Retreat, and that the certification had been intended only as a short-term measure until the inquisition got under way. Loud applause broke out when Burrows declared that he would relinquish care of Edward regardless of the decision of the jury. Brougham ascertained from Burrows that the doctor had had few personal interviews with Edward, as he visited his own asylum just twice a week, for a couple of hours. Yes, said Burrows, it was perfectly in order to take a family’s version of events as the basis of certification, as these were the very people best placed to spot a change in behaviour and to note down examples of oddness. Mrs Bywater had probably saved her own life, he said, by her prompt calling in of the doctors, and if the jury were to find Edward of sound mind, it might lie heavy on their conscience if Mrs Bywater were subsequently murdered by her pistol-carrying son. This statement elicited visual signs of disapproval and disgust on the faces of the jurymen. In a final flourish, Burrows declared that Edward was clearly insane because he had been following the daily reports of his case in the newspapers and had told him that the doctors – ‘men of character and honour’, as Burrows called them – were telling falsehoods about him at the inquisition. Only a madman would come to such a conclusion.

A doctor from the London Hospital stated that Edward had a ‘delusion of manner about him’ – a form of words abruptly described as ‘Nonsense!’ by Edward’s counsel. Hissing and jeering broke out in the room when Dr Algernon Frampton said that the reason he had concluded that Edward was insane on 7 December was the patient’s refusal to admit that he had been insane on 8 August. Commissioner Phillimore threatened to clear the room if the spectators would not cease their abuse of the witnesses.

Other witnesses came forward to say that the danger on the Hornsey roads was a perfectly good reason for Edward to have bought pistols; that £7,000 had been the correct market price for Oakfield House; and that tea dealers Gibbs’s and Varnham’s testimony might be coloured by their known desire to become partners in Hodgson & Davies.

Dr John Haslam was asked by Brougham if he had read through all the affidavits collected by Edward’s accusers before holding his own interview with the patient, and he said that yes, he had. This mode of proceeding – reading up on the alleged delusions first, and then trying to confirm their existence – was jeered at by both Brougham and the spectators, because of its lack of methodological rigour.

On the tenth day of the inquisition, Christmas Eve, the jury went to see Edward for themselves at the Retreat; although alleged lunatics could attend their own hearings, many (including Edward) chose to spare themselves the ordeal. They were back at the coffee house again at eleven o’clock on Boxing Day morning, and the foreman of the jury told Commissioner Phillimore that there was no need for the case to continue – the jurymen were unanimously decided and they believed they knew what was being attempted against Edward Davies, and why. This was a highly unusual development in a lunacy hearing, and the Commissioner informed the jury that the family had the right to continue to put its case, but it is clear from the tittering that punctuated the remaining testimony how the entire room was minded. The ongoing laughter ‘was difficult to suppress’, the
Morning Chronicle
reporter stated.

Mrs Bywater’s counsel plodded on – for four hours – telling the jury that ‘Mr Davies had not only thought himself a Pitt in finance, a Fox in eloquence, a Byron in poetry, but an Apollo in beauty’. He accused Edward’s legal team of treating the mad-doctors ‘not as men
of science, but as a kind of resurrection men – medical poachers, laying springs [traps] for His Majesty’s subjects’.

Nevertheless, cheering and loud applause greeted the jury’s unanimous verdict that Edward was of ‘perfectly sound mind’, and experienced reporters wrote that they had never seen such ‘warm’ reaction to a jury’s decision.

The verdict that freed Edward destroyed Burrows’s career. About 250 people demonstrated outside the Retreat, and the doctor received nearly forty threatening letters, including one that read, ‘Dr Burrows is cautioned to take care of himself. His consummate villainy will be expiated by BLOOD only.’ Four months later, at the end of April 1830, when Freeman Anderdon won £500 from Burrows in his successful lawsuit for assault and false imprisonment, the wreck was complete. ‘The effervescence of popular prejudice’ and the ‘painful animadversions on my character’, as the doctor put it, effectively meant that Burrows could no longer be taken seriously as a lunacy specialist. The newspapers had had to hold fire while the Davies case was in progress, but as soon as the verdict was announced, opprobrium rained down on Burrows and the mad-doctors.
The
Times
editorial stated that the commission against Edward had looked very much like ‘persecution’. Failing to be cheered by the Davies verdict,
The Times
insisted that, ‘The melancholy fact is that your thorough-going mad-doctor takes for granted that hardly anyone is sane . . . It is the law of England that any one of us may be seized by a pair of ruffians, under the warrant of a mad-doctor . . . and plunged for life into that hopeless prison, which is calculated to unsettle the steadiest intellect.’ The influential
Quarterly Review
described

Like Edward Davies himself, Dr Burrows had had no family connections or influential friends to help him start out in life; his widowed mother had had him apprenticed, at the age of sixteen, to a surgeon. He had been an outstanding and naturally gifted boy who had made his own way in the world, founding one of the first medical journals in England, and in 1815 he had played an important role in improving the professional standing of physicians by insisting on standardised qualifications. In 1828, Burrows published his
Commentaries on the Causes, Forms, Symptoms and Treatment, Moral and Medical, of Insanity
, one of the major early-nineteenth-century compendia of thinking about insanity.

Like most (but not all) alienists of the time, Burrows believed that insanity was a hereditary disease; and he thought that Edward had been in need of urgent treatment. The earlier the intervention, the greater the chance of cure, was the cry of the alienists. ‘This perverse concealment has often a very baneful effect,’ Burrows wrote regarding families who failed to come forward to report the mental disturbance of a relative, fearing the shame that such a disclosure could bring. Burrows’s long experience of treating lunacy had, he claimed, led him to spot instantly, within the tales told to him by the family, the undoubted signs that mental affliction was setting in. It had been clear from what Mrs Bywater had told Burrows that her son’s ‘malady appeared to be progressive’. There was every reason to be hopeful that an eventual cure for Edward would be achieved, Burrows had believed, so long as he was in a place of custody where appropriate treatment could be administered.

It was a mark of optimism that ‘cure’ and ‘treatment’ were on the alienists’ agenda at all: up to the end of the previous century, containment and restraint had been the main responses to the onset of insanity. But this ‘progress’ had gone hand in hand with what, to many, seemed to be the pathologising of perfectly ordinary human weirdness. Burrows himself had written in his
Commentaries
:

There could scarcely be a passage more likely to inflame the average Briton. Except perhaps this, 190 pages later: Dr Burrows believed that all lunatics gave off a smell that he could compare only to henbane, a toxic plant also called ‘stinking nightshade’ (with rather pretty yellow flowers). ‘I consider the maniacal odour a pathognomonic symptom so unerring, that if I detected it in any person, I should not hesitate to pronounce him insane, even though I had no other proof of it.’ This was a view sincerely held by Burrows, though a renowned alienist would later insist that all he was smelling was the stink of the asylum and the hard-to-shift miasma caused by the doubly incontinent.

Burrows appeared to have no idea of how diagnosis by sniffing was
likely to be viewed by non-physicians. For all his belief in mad-folk’s ‘obliquity in perception and judgment’, he seems to have been a man curiously short on self-awareness.
The Lancet
drew the comparison of Burrows with Witchfinder-General Matthew Hopkins’s smelling out of witches in seventeenth-century East Anglia – a cruel undermining of the thrusting empiricism Burrows had set store by.

Yet it is slightly unfair to mock such notions as the smell of a madman; because, in fact, the texts of many nineteenth-century alienists reveal not so much bumptious over-confidence as an agonised consciousness that they were still in a state of ignorance of the anatomical or psychological causes of mental problems. ‘The current state of our imperfect knowledge’ was a typical expression they used; in fact, Burrows himself had written that ‘we are in the infancy of our knowledge’. Many alienists knew that they were still advancing guesswork. What is less easy to forgive, though, is the flawed, or even specious, reasoning used by certain doctors; and the mocking laughter that punctuated the Davies inquisition showed that the public, as speedily as the lawyers, had spotted the methodological errors of the men who tried to prove Edward’s insanity. They had approached Edward believing him to be insane, and then set about tracking down any evidence that would bolster that opinion. The
London Medical Gazette
despairingly noted: ‘As to the evidence of the medical witnesses, it was, with a few exceptions, wretchedly bad. In some instances, it was absolutely imbecile; in others, pompous, vulgar and absurd . . . There is nothing of which the public are more jealous than any measure interfering with personal liberty emanating from a private source, and it is right they should be so.’ The doctors did not appear to have considered that Edward’s ‘paroxysms’ could have been the actions of a sane man enduring extraordinary levels of stress. The
Gazette
stated that Edward did appear at one point to be ‘suffering from functional disorder of the nervous system, with anxiety, restlessness, vigilance and exaltation bordering upon delirium’, and that – of the doctors chosen by Mrs Bywater – only Dr Peter Latham had appeared to wonder how this behaviour might fit in with Edward’s usual demeanour.

The
Quarterly Review
quoted John Haslam’s 1809 book,
Observations on Madness and Melancholy
, as an example of alienists’ flawed diagnostic procedure. ‘The physician’s own mind must be the criterion by which he infers the insanity of any other person,’ Haslam had written. In
this way, the
Review
pointed out, doctors had elected themselves arbiters of normality; and so when they came up against an extraordinary but sane person, such as Edward Davies, they categorised him as mad. If the doctors hired by Mrs Bywater had broadened their inquiry and properly investigated the odd manner that Edward had displayed throughout his life, there would have been no need for an inquisition costing £5,000.