The origins of forensic psychiatry in the United States and the great nineteenth-century crisis over the adjudication of wills

Forensic psychiatry emerged as a professional activity in the United States during the first third of the nineteenth century when four major factors coalesced: the medicolegal vision of early American physicians, the introduction of new theories about insanity, the concern of early state governments with mental health, and the advent of marketplace professionalism. From the outset, forensic psychiatry found itself involved in the adjudication of wills. The evidence suggests that postmortem diagnoses of insanity were employed through the middle decades of the nineteenth century to maintain stable and predictable patterns of property conveyance in the new republic. But such diagnoses then became something of a fad, a way to raid estates. Courts and legislatures reacted against that trend during the last decades of the nineteenth century, when fundamental social stability was no longer an issue, in order to protect individual testators and limit the power of forensic psychiatry. By the early decades of the twentieth century, patterns had emerged that have since been taken as normative.