wfgodot
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I posted the link on an earlier Broadmoor-centric thread, but this - for WS, primarily because it includes a picture of Daniel McNaughten, the person from whom that long-time key aspect of insanity pleas, the so-called McNaughten Rules, gets its name - deserves notice of its own. The Daily Mail article also tells the story of McNaughten's attempted assassination of British PM Sir Robert Peel, which went badly wrong.
Also here: the "mad" artist Richard Dadd; Edward Oxford, who attempted to shoot Queen Victoria; William Chester Minor, who assisted in the compiling of our language's greatest dictionary, the OED; the child butcher Martha Bacon; and five more.
Portraits of madness: Some were brilliant. All had a compulsion to kill. Broadmoor's first inmates caught on camera
Also here: the "mad" artist Richard Dadd; Edward Oxford, who attempted to shoot Queen Victoria; William Chester Minor, who assisted in the compiling of our language's greatest dictionary, the OED; the child butcher Martha Bacon; and five more.
Portraits of madness: Some were brilliant. All had a compulsion to kill. Broadmoor's first inmates caught on camera
the pictures and stories at DM link aboveThey may look like any other old Victorian photographic portraits — the subjects formal, stiffly posed and somewhat self-conscious.
But, in fact, they are the deranged killers and would-be murderers who were among the first patients at Broadmoor, which opened 150 years ago.
The pictures are the work of Henry Hering, a pioneering photographer, and some were taken at Bethlem (or ‘Bedlam’ as it was known), the lunatic asylum in South London.
Others were shot at Broadmoor after Bethlem patients had been transferred to the newly opened institution in Berkshire.
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