I'm at the point where I am doing three things simultaneously:
1. Going through and polishing the sentences, looking for bad transitions, and the like. This is a boring but necessary action.
2. Adding more personal accounts of both what went wrong with my brother's spiral down into mental illness, and that of other people I knew. This is sometimes quite painful as it dredges up memories.
3. Using books.google.com to search for additional sources, especially in the nineteenth century, to either fill in material or verify the accuracy of secondary sources. For example, Albert Deutsch's Mentally Ill in America characterizes Morgan Hinchman's 1849 civil suit for wrongful commitment in a way that didn't make much sense to me. Paul S. Appelbaum and Kathleen N. Kemp, “The Evolution of Commitment Law in the Nineteenth Century: A Reinterpretation,” Law and Human Behavior, 6:3-4 [1982], 345 argues that Deutsch was completely wrong about the role of the Hinchman decision in causing the development of Pennsylvania's commitment due process changes. I dug around a bit, and found Hinchman v. Richie (C.P. 1849) available in full. And yes, not only was Deutsch wrong about this, but way wrong.
No comments:
Post a Comment