A controversial psychiatrist, Lyttleton Stewart Forbes Winslow (1844-1913) grew up around the lunatic asylums run by his father, Forbes B. Winslow, who was a specialist in the treatment of mental illness, establishing also medical grounds for the plea of insanity in criminal defence. Lyttleton spent much of his own medical career attempting to show the courts that crime and alcoholism were linked to mental illness, though he later gained notoriety for his amateur detective work: he claimed to know the identity of Jack the Ripper. Published in 1874, this book examines, often through case descriptions, the legal framework within which the mentally ill were managed, and comparisons are made with the status quo elsewhere in the world. It is an enlightening but often disturbing insight into the institutional treatment of mental illness in the late nineteenth century.
