Medicine, law, and the state: The emergence of forensic psychiatry in Imperial Russia

This dissertation examines the emergence of forensic psychiatry as a discipline and source of social authority in Imperial Russia. Within autocratic political culture, physicians' role in the legal system offered a unique mechanism for exercising occupational authority and influence on the social body. Under the prereform inquisitorial system of procedure, medical testimony was decisive in determining the outcomes of criminal investigations. Physicians also developed a close relationship with jurists under this shared intellectual and administrative framework in post-Petrine Russia. These factors contributed to physicians' distinctive outlook in a comparative European context, and the manner in which they fashioned their social identity in the postreform period. Drawing on Senate decisions, trial transcripts, a vast periodical literature, archival sources, and the popular press, this work explores the interrelations between autocratic policy, intellectual change, and the formation of professional identities. As Russian medical professionals in the latter half of the nineteenth century expanded their ideological categories to include a wider array of social behavior, they also sought a more influential and central role within the courts and state institutions. These two developments were intimately linked and mutually reinforcing. Physicians were disgruntled by the limitations and contradictory nature of the legal status that the state defined for them. At the same time, they invoked the authority of science to legitimize their attempts to regularize and change their procedural role and the judicial apparatus. The emergent medical and legal professions—both critical of the autocracy and the state institutions in which they worked—joined forces in their attempts to fundamentally transform the autocratic system and its institutions, based on claims of technical expertise and scientific rationality. In working out the 1864 judicial reform, medical and legal activists cooperatively sought to extend medical expertise more pervasively throughout state institutions in order to “rationalize”, improve, and thereby secure the new rule-of-law framework. Analyzing the multivalent public debate over the medical expert's role, this dissertation demonstrates the ways in which the professional evolution of forensic medicine in Russia took a different turn from Western models, and how professionalization in late Imperial Russia became associated with liberal legal reform.