famously termed the asylum for the insane un instrument de gug?ison, a curative instrument. Some decades later Esquirol's colleague, Jean-Baptiste-Maximien Parchappe (at the time inspecteur ggngrale du service des aligngs), called the asylum for the insane the fruit of 'the association of medical science with architectural art and administrative science'.' Thus the alienists constructed a particular medico-architectural problematique. My aim in this paper is to give an overview of the historical development of the association of architecture and mental medicine in nineteenth-century Norway. In what sense was the asylum conceived as a curative instrument? What was the psychiatric meaning of architecture? The discussion will focus on four different asylum projects, each representative for its particular period. These four asylum projects represent, in turn, four different models for asylums for the insane: the radial system, the pavilion system, the one-block system and the colony system. Each of these models represents different aspects of contemporary psychiatry; the instrument reflects certain aspects of the instrumentalist. But first, I will start with a few words on the architectural-historical backdrop from which the plans for a modem asylum emerged. Incarceration: dollhusThe madhouses (dollhus) were built from the 1770s until well into the nineteenth century, for sheltering the mad. But this intended use had no

Since antiquity, some men have not been considered accountable for their actions when they transgressed the law, and were exempted from legal penalties, or given lesser ones. Why? The rationale for legal exemption has varied over time. So have the labels assigned to such lawbreakers, and even the personnel involved in the labelling process. For centuries, settling the question of deviant mental states of relevance to the court seemed relatively unproblematic. It was thought that personal acquaintance would easily discover such states of mind and the court could then be notified. It was not until the nineteenth century that western society felt a need to regulate this problematique. As a result, or as a precondition for this process of settling the question of legal accountability, the matter came to be construed in part as a medical problem. Physicians, and later psychiatrists, came to be regarded as possessing specific knowledge in this area which qualified them to judge a person's legal accountability. Personal knowledge of the deranged defendant was supplanted by professional knowledge of sanity and insanity as the basis for authority on the matter of accountability.This essay seeks to investigate how the question of legal accountability became transformed into a matter of medical authority, based on the case of Norway. The study involves an understanding of the relationship between forensic psychiatry and its disciplinary neighbours, jurisprudence, medicine and theology, and sensitivity to the language employed, the shifting terms used, and the changing meanings of those same terms.

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