This paper explores the intersection of race, law and medical authority in Gilded Age New York through an examination of the trial and execution of Chastine Cox. This case was a media sensation due to two controversies which played out in the courtroom and the court of public opinion. For the public, Cox’s race inflected the debate over the crime and execution. Within the courtroom, however, controversy centred on the interpretation of medical evidence, which raised the possibility that Cox was not guilty. In particular, the defence strategy centred on medical theories of suspended animation, making use of new medical evidence about the line between life and death to prompt uncertainties both about the possibility of murder and the reliability of medical professionals. This paper demonstrates the ways in which anxieties about life, death, law, race and medicine were negotiated in courts of law and public opinion.
...More
Article
Nicholas Duvall;
(2017)
‘If experts differ, what are we to do in the matter?’ The Medico-legal Investigation of Gunshot Wounds in a 1927 Scottish Murder Trial
(/isis/citation/CBB537944644/)
Chapter
Diego Carnevale;
(2020)
Visum et Repertum: Medical Doctrine and Criminal Procedures in France and Naples (17th–18th Centuries)
(/isis/citation/CBB884894838/)
Article
Giuseppe Di Cesare;
Lucia Parlato;
(2017)
The Role of DNA as Scientific Evidence
(/isis/citation/CBB884519186/)
Thesis
Jentzen, Jeffrey M.;
(2007)
Death Investigation in America: Coroners, Medical Examiners, and the Pursuitof Medical Certainty
(/isis/citation/CBB001560986/)
Article
Garton, Stephen;
(2010)
Criminal Propensities: Psychiatry, Classification and Imprisonment in New York State 1916--1940
(/isis/citation/CBB000932833/)
Book
Courtney E. Thompson;
(2021)
An Organ of Murder: Crime, Violence, and Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century America
(/isis/citation/CBB576199907/)
Chapter
Yuqun Liao;
Xiaoyuan Jiang;
(2021)
Song Ci, the Xi Yuan Ji Lu, and the Judicial Examination System
(/isis/citation/CBB186002736/)
Article
Kieval, Hillel J.;
(2012)
The Rules of the Game: Forensic Medicine and the Language of Science in the Structuring of Modern Ritual Murder Trials
(/isis/citation/CBB001320015/)
Article
Lynne Feeley;
(April 2019)
The Elevationists: Gerrit Smith, Black Agrarianism, and Land Reform in 1840s New York
(/isis/citation/CBB944344857/)
Book
Paolo Cassoli;
(2023)
Marcello Malpighi sospettato di omicidio. Il grande scienziato alle prese con la giustizia
(/isis/citation/CBB244082930/)
Book
Burney, Ian;
(2000)
Bodies of Evidence: Medicine and the Politics of the English Inquest, 1830-1926
(/isis/citation/CBB000111135/)
Article
Giuseppe Sartori;
Giulia Melis;
(2022)
Deception in Court
(/isis/citation/CBB180040129/)
Article
Gilbert Shama;
(2017)
Miracle near 34th street: Wartime Penicillin Research at St John’s University, NY
(/isis/citation/CBB340910009/)
Article
James Schlett;
(2022)
When Rollo May’s “little band” of New York psychologists fought back against organized medicine’s attempts to control psychotherapy
(/isis/citation/CBB438968805/)
Book
Anderson, Marynita;
(2004)
Physician Heal Thyself: Medical Practitioners of Eighteenth-Century New York
(/isis/citation/CBB000830652/)
Article
Poliak, Daniel B.;
(2013)
Ritual Circumcision in the Age of Germ Theory amongst Nineteenth-Century New York Immigrants
(/isis/citation/CBB001320604/)
Article
Gronim, Sara Stidstone;
(2006)
Imagining Inoculation: Smallpox, the Body, and Social Relations of Healing in the Eighteenth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB000670712/)
Chapter
Morantz-Sanchez, Regina;
(2009)
Female Patient Agency and the 1892 Trial of Dr. Mary Dixon Jones in Late Nineteenth-Century Brooklyn
(/isis/citation/CBB001031388/)
Article
Lorente Carpena, Amalio;
(2010)
Violación y transgresión. Medicina forense y moral sexual en la España del siglo XIX
(/isis/citation/CBB001020963/)
Book
Rosamaria Alibrandi;
(2022)
Medicina Forense e criminalistica nel crinale del moderno (sec. XVI-XIX)
(/isis/citation/CBB291215487/)
Be the first to comment!