Spontaneous Innocence: Physiological Knowledge in Medical Jurisprudence in British India, ca. 1856-1918

The capacity of a human body to spontaneously harm itself was a major concern for medical jurisprudence in the British Raj. Those accused of crimes against the body could and did claim that the harm they were accused of was caused spontaneously by the victim’s body rather than through their criminal actions. These spontaneous capacities were varied and various, ranging from the possibility of ‘spontaneous combustion’ whereby a human being could allegedly self-ignite, to the notoriously common claim of spontaneous splenic rupture often used by Europeans charged with beating their Indian servants to death. Such spontaneous capacities were also frequently specified by race and gender. The marking or unmarking of spontaneous harm along axes of race and gender draws attention to the ways in which claims of innocence remain a form of situated knowledge thickly enmeshed in contextual articulations of plausibility and power. There has been significant scholarly interest in some of these capacities, such as the tendency to splenic rupture, but they have been looked at in isolation and without much attention to medical jurisprudence. In this paper, I want to pursue three inter-related questions. First, what were the types of spontaneous capacities attributed to the body that could absolve an accused of any guilt? Second, can these various types of spontaneous activity allow us to detect a coherent physiology of spontaneity in the textbooks on medical jurisprudence? Finally, I will explore precisely how much of this notion of spontaneity was specific to British India.