Insanity as the loss of self : the moral insanity controversy revisited / S.P. Fullinwider.
Abstract:
"During the middle part of the 19th century the great dispute dividing the superintendents of American hospitals for the mentally ill was over the question of moral insanity'--the idea that one's moral sense can be deranged without accompanying intellectual derangement."
Bulletin of the history of medicine Vol. 49 (1975), p. 87-101