En indre makt. Howitzfeiden og psykiatriens framvekst

Resumé

An interior force. The Howitz dispute and the emergence of psychiatry
In 1821, an 18-year-old servant girl in Copenhagen attempted to murder her sleeping mistress with her bare hands. In the ensuing trial, the court invited a number of medical doctors to investigate her sanity. None of them found that she was legally insane, but they all found her to be abnormal, indicating that this abnormality should have some repercussions on the legal decision about her. As a result of these medical and legal deliberations, the girl was submitted to some sort of improvised medical surveillance regime in lieu of the usual punishment. The case subsequently triggered what has been known in Danish historiography as ‘the Howitz dispute’, or the ‘free will debate’, in which medical professor Franz Howitz challenged the anthropology of the Danish legal establishment. The dispute is well known and often discussed, but the present author argues that two crucial factors inhibit our understanding of it: details of the case that preceded it (the servant) and the medical debate that was simultaneously taking place in other countries. The article situates the dispute’s central text in a legal context, by way of the trial of the servant girl, and in a medical context, by way of the German–French dispute on homicidal monomania.
By taking these two factors into consideration, we can more easily see that the matter of dispute, at least for Howitz, was not whether the insane should be punished or not, but whether questions of responsibility should be the central focus of encounters between medical experts and courts of law.