The United States vs. Charles Guiteau: A case study of law, medicine, and society in the late nineteenth century

Charles Guiteau's assassination of President James Garfield in 1881 led to Guiteau's arrest and trial for murder. Guiteau's peculiar behavior and claims of divine inspiration opened debate of his sanity at the time of the shooting, and his attorney based Guiteau's defense on the concept of non compos mentis---possession of an unsound mind during a crime that disabled an individual's responsibility for his or her actions.;My thesis examines Guiteau's insanity defense through three aspects of the social construction of mental illness that serve as lenses into legal, medical, and societal opinions of mental illness at the end of the nineteenth century. Analysis of the discourse surrounding Guiteau's trial and his insanity plea reveals conflict in three arenas about how to determine insanity and how insanity influenced responsibility for criminal actions. Disagreement amongst medical professionals about how to define insanity plagued the medical jurisprudence of insanity during the nineteenth century, making a single medical definition of insanity impossible. The second area of conflict---medical and legal definitions of insanity and responsibility in the courtroom---struggled alongside inconsistent medical definitions, partially due to the epistemological differences between law and medicine. The high profile of Guiteau's crime showcases these conflicts, enabling historians to examine key questions that constructed nineteenth-century ideas about mental illness: what is insanity; who determines insanity; how shall society address the issue of mental health.