The liability of madness and the commission of lunacy in New South Wales, 1805–12

Bureaucracy, archive files, and the making of knowledge

“…Working on nineteenth century New Jersey, James Moran compares the bureaucratic legacy of the asylum and that of the civil law in knowledge production about madness. Whereas asylums and their bureaucratic legacy are familiar to those working in the field of madness studies, lunacy investigation law has received little historical attention, despite the pioneering work of Akihito Suzuki (2006) and treatments which approach the investigation from different perspectives (Stebbings 2012;Dunk 2018). Moran's 'Tale of Two Bureaucracies' incorporates his own research narrativea chance discovery of a rich seam of legal files which offered insight into the workings of madness outside the institutions designed to contain it.…”