A Narrow Definition of Insanity Opined by Medical Experts in the Oliver Smith Will Case in 1847
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Physicians specializing in the diagnosis and treatment of insane people (alienists) emerged in the early 19th century and offered their expertise for the courts to consider in judgments of mental competence. In the Oliver Smith will case (1847), the competency of an attesting witness was contested on the issue of insanity. Four well-known alienists testified at trial. Although the insanity of the witness could have been viewed in broader terms, the experts used a narrow definition of insanity based primarily on the presence of delusions. These opinions were only partially consistent with contemporaneous medical notions of insanity and the broad definition of criminal responsibility. We suggest three explanatory factors for the narrow definition related to available medical knowledge, courtroom restrictions including the case itself, and mid-19th-century relationships between mental medicine and the law.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".