Innocence in Cases of Infanticide: Dutch Forensic Medicine and Psychiatry, 1925-1950

In cases of infanticide, forensic medicine has always played an important role, examining the baby’s and the mother’s body. The mother’s mind and her emotional state were to some extent relevant in the nineteenth-century courtroom, but in the twentieth century psychiatry gained more influence in the Netherlands. Forensic psychiatrists applied the notion of ‘puerperal psychosis’ in the first decades and different concepts from psychoanalysis by mid-twentieth century. Several notions of innocence, related to unaccountability and insanity, interact in these cases: whereas forensic medicine searched for clear signs of murder on the body, forensic psychiatry aimed to explain the act of child murder by referring to the mind – especially psychoanalytic explanations revolving around femininity, sexuality and motherhood. Moreover, more general cultural images of gender influenced both psychiatry and the law. In the nineteenth century, young unmarried women were often seen as the innocent victims of a patriarchal system which left them unprotected, even if they were guilty of infanticide. This image of innocent girls can still be traced in the twentieth century, but seems to have been in tension with psychoanalytical views on femininity. This paper will explore these different conceptions of gendered innocence in forensic medicine, psychiatry and (legal) culture, arguing that murdering mothers continued to baffle the law and science in an age of increasing trust in forensic science and its regime of truth, because women and motherhood remained a mystery.