ABSTRACT
This chapter lays out the historical contexts that surround the emergence of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (MSbP), named by Roy Meadow in 1977. Increasing provision of accommodation in hospitals in the 1960s for mothers to ‘live in’ with their sick children is a vital part of the context for MSbP – enabling long-term deceptive abuse. Broader concerns around child abuse also emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in the UK and North America that fed into the kind of suspicion that characterises this diagnosis. Extensive diagnostic procedures in specialist hospitals were figured as abusive in the context of fabricated symptoms. The emergence of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) connects MSbP to a concern around infant mortality in a way that moves diagnosis out of hospitals and in the realm of statistical population-level analysis. This had disastrous repercussions in a number of murder convictions secured with Meadow's evidence. Several mothers then had convictions of baby-murder quashed in a way that destroyed the credibility of MSbP diagnoses. There are again some ways that this MSbP analysis is profoundly shaped by the author's experiences, but mostly this historical account seems at a considerable distance from any personal experience.
