What is criminal, what sane, what mad or simply bad? Through court and asylum records, letters and newspapers accounts, this book brings to life some key trials of the last decades of the 19th century and the first of the 20th, a period when the psychiatric professions were consolidating their hold on our understanding of the human. Sexual and class roles, attitudes to love and madness, let alone notions of respectability and honour, sanity and madness, all are at play in the theatre of the courtroom - where the figure of the expert witness begins to make his power felt.?? In Brighton in 1870, the 'Chocolate Cream Poisoner'- 'refined, tall, fair, a lady of fortune and extremely prepossessing in manner', as the papers describe her at her trial - unleashes an escalating campaign of poisoning. What has led her to such vengeful acts? In Paris in 1880, the thirty-one-year-old singer Marie Bière's crime fills the papers for months. Disguised by a wide brimmed hat and lorgnon, she stalked her betraying lover through the streets of Paris until she shot him, wounding but not murdering him as planned. When the jury acquit her, it seems to be an act of popular will. But what feeds into the shaping of this liberal verdict??? In New York on a hot night in 1906, millionaire Harry K. Thaw shoots the famous architect Stanford White dead in full view of an audience at the chic roof theatre of Madison Square Garden.

Embroiled in a crime of passion, Thaw's act throws light on the place women play in the murdering imagination - and in the public perception of guilt and madness. Few have focussed on the psychiatric history this notorious case contains and its formative influence on the public mind and expert ideas. With great storytelling flair and a wealth of historical detail, Lisa Appignanesi teases out the vagaries of passion, and the clashes between the court and the clinic as they stumble towards a sometimes reviled collaboration.