ABSTRACT
During the second half of the nineteenth century, psychiatry increasingly replaced obstetrics as the authoritative medical body pronouncing upon the insanity of child-bed. This process tended to locate infanticide as a symptom of an illness, routinely referred to as 'puerperal insanity'. The relatively recently established psychiatric profession saw an opportunity to legitimate its usefulness to society by addressing the concerns raised by the 'infanticide crisis' of the 1860s. 1 These concerns were accompanied by an increased number of cases receiving medical attention as more doctors attended 'problem' deliveries, 2 following which it was believed that puerperal insanity was more likely to occur. The psychiatric profession functioned as an ostensibly 'objective' and 'scientific' body, providing sanitized explanations for the spectre of the mad mother. As psychiatry expanded and became increasingly professionalized, individual doctors colonized particular areas to create their own specialisms. 3 Some doctors chose to make insanity their speciality and worked in the numerous county lunatic asylums or as private specialists. However, there were many general medical practitioners, such as family doctors, who also treated cases of insanity. Significantly, in the mid-Victorian period, psychiatry was not a coherent, authoritative body of 194knowledge. 4 There were no authoritative diagnostic manuals, no set text-books and no recognized qualifications. Rather, psychiatrists or alienists were simply conversant with a particular body of knowledge and made use of this knowledge to treat cases of insanity. In this chapter, I shall use the term 'psychiatric profession' to refer to those employing and contributing to this knowledge, whatever their professional qualifications. 5
