In 1829, Freeman Anderton’s lawsuit against prominent alienist (psychiatrist in 19th-century speak) Dr. George Man Burrows for wrongful confinement (which Anderton won) revealed something to the British public that had not hitherto been common knowledge. Namely, that it was a common practice of many alienists to use unofficial “letters de cachet” to lend legitimacy to their attendants when they came to take away the person in question, solely to prevent those around the “lunatic” from interfering.
And, perhaps more disturbing, was the fact that these declarations of a person’s lunacy were most often made without the physician ever having examined the patient.
In his defense against Anderton’s suit, Burrows argued that it was often necessary for a physician to rely on the word of family members or close friends to determine a person’s state of mind because “procrastination could end up in suicide or homicide in an urgent case” (Suzuki 53).
It doesn’t take a devious mind to see the possibilities for corruption of this practice, and it’s one of those possibilities that I write about in Good Dukes Wear Black. While there don’t seem to be any cases similar to the one I describe in the book, where Dr. Hayes is persuaded to have women confined on the word of his own brother, it does seem to me to have been possible. And from there I wove my story.
If you’d like to read more about the treatment of madness in the 19th century and the ways in which alienists navigated the waters between the public and the domestic, I highly recommend Madness at Home: The Psychiatrist, the Patient, and the Family in England, 1820–1860, University of California Press, (2006) by Akihito Suzuki.