Unintended Consequences: Delirium Tremens as a Defense to Murder

This paper focuses on the ways in which the study of delirium tremens, also known as mania a potu, blurred the line between habit and mental disease and became a viable defense to violent crime.  In 1827, Alexander Drew murdered his second mate at sea, and in 1827, John Birdsell murdered his wife.  Both men had engaged in the excessive consumption of alcohol in the days prior to their crimes, and both men sought a defense based on insanity caused by delirium tremens.  In the early nineteenth century the law held that intoxication provided no defense to crime as it was viewed as a voluntary condition; however, a diagnosis of delirium tremens, a temporary form of insanity caused by heavy drinking, expanded the definition of exculpatory insanity.  Delirium tremens, it was argued, could provide a defense to crime because it existed as a form of insanity separate from a state of drunkenness as an unwanted and unintended consequence of intoxication.  The complicated sense of intoxication and responsibility in this period is reflected in the rich detail of these individual cases as well as in the very different verdicts – Drew was acquitted while Birdsell was found guilty.