r) said that phrenology "is today looked upon as a passing field in the history of thought" but "it made distinct contributions to the knowledge of the structure of the brain" (p. 251). Ray never ceased believing in phrenology.
In the mid-to-late 1830s, Ray began to express in lectures and articles in Charles Sumner's American Jurist and later in his first book, Treatise on the Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity (1838), his views in the field of forensic psychiatry. According to Overholser, Ray was "by far the most influential American writer in forensic psychiatry in the whole nineteenth century" (p. 249). Allen et al. defined forensic psychiatry as "that branch of psychiatry dealing with the legal aspects of mental disorders" (p. 502). Fink (1984) said the Treatise was "the first systematic treatise on medical jurisprudence" (p. 52). Pate said that after the 1830s "Ray focused his attention almost exclusively on insanity and the law" (p. 10).
A core belief of Ray's was his theory of moral insanity.
Ray believed that mental illness could only be understood by studying scientifically the brains of persons suffering from it. Hughes (1982) said Ray held that "all disease was physical . . . insanity, like any other disease, resulted from organic changes, in this case of the brain" (p. 9). In his Treatise, Ray said that "insanity is a disease, and, . . . the fact of its existence is never established by a single diagnostic symptom, but by the whole body of symptoms, no particular one of which is present in every case" (pp. 39-40).
Hughes said that as a scientist, Ray "held a . . . naturalistic view of human beings; the mind and the behavior it manifested were aspects of a person's physical nature [much of which was inherited] . . . a . . . deterministic view" (pp. xiv-xv). This clashed with the dominant post-Enlightenment view of the mid-19th century, under which man was defined "as a rational creature who was free to choose ...