Emotions, Medicine and the Law

Also under debate in ‘Emotions, Medicine and the Law’, is the way that legal contests have shaped our understanding of our emotional experiences. The symposium will focus on two themes:

Professor Michael Lobban, of the Department of Law, and historian Rhodri Hayward will discuss how notions of shock and stress evolved in 19th and early 20th Century cases of industrial compensation.  

Professor Lobban, an expert on legal history, explained: “Over the last decade the relationship between psychological medicine and the law has been the subject of fierce debate. Claims for psychological trauma, stress and psychiatric injury are regular features of British legal life yet the objective status of the claimed emotional experience remains uncertain.”

Drs Thomas Dixon and Fay Bound Alberti, both of the Department of History, will examine how petitioners’ feelings took on a new significance in 18th and 19th Century divorce proceedings.

Dr Bound Alberti suggests that emotional cruelty was informally recognised as a reason for marital separation long before it was enshrined in law. “The idea that mistreatment in verbal, emotional and psychological ways constituted domestic violence as much as physical violence has seldom been considered for the pre-nineteenth century,” she added.  

Through an analysis of evidence from the church courts - aside from private Acts of Parliament, the only place where men and women could legally separate before the 1857 Matrimonial Act - the lecture will examine the meanings of emotional cruelty for husbands and wives of all social classes.

It will also show that despite historical assumptions of the lack of affection in early modern households, emotional satisfaction was critical to individual and social expectations of a good marriage.

Emotions, Medicine and the Law will be held at 2.00pm on Wednesday 29 April in the Clinical Lecture Theatre, Francis Bancroft Building, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS.