De lunatico inquirendo: managing family inheritance across madness in eighteenth-century London.

ABSTRACT

An 'inquisition' (or inquiry) held before a Justice of the Peace was the primary instrument for management of lunacy in eighteenth-century England. Yet its purpose was to protect wealth rather than the individual. The 1766 case book of Dr John Monro, London's leading doctor for madness, unexpectedly records a consultation that links two siblings who both had inquisitions. Nicholas Jeffreys' only son was attested lunatic in 1744 to circumvent inheritance through primogeniture, Jeffreys directed the family wealth to his last living child. One of his three daughters married Lord Camden, a former Lord Chancellor after her and her second sister's deaths, the last-surviving sister was also placed under inquisition in 1780, to ensure the inheritance for his own family.