ABSTRACT
In December 1890, a 22-year-old woman named Gabrielle Bompard was accused of complicity in the brutal murder and robbery of a Parisian bailiff. The audacious view that Bompard had been completely unconscious of her acts was advanced by Jules Liegeois, Professor of Administrative Law at Nancy and the most outspoken disciple of the psychiatrist Hippolyte Bernheim. Liegeois expounded most volubly on the extra-medical realm of hypnosis as early as 1884 when he presented a memoir on its medico-legal implications to the Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiques before an audience of philosophers, publicists, social reformers, and medical men. The fact that the Parisians laboured to have the defendant condemned with a vehemence which matched the prosecution’s tends to suggest that moral and social issues outside the realm of medical doctrine alone influenced the position they upheld so rigidly in the courtroom.
