Diagnostic Logic and Forensic Reading: The Case of Wieland.

This article examines how late eighteenth-century literature, particularly Charles Brockden Brown's 1798 novel *Wieland*, contributed to the emergence and dissemination of a "diagnostic logic" that shaped readers' engagement with mental health and moral accountability. It highlights how physician Benjamin Rush incorporated popular and literary sources, including crime reports and Shakespeare, to develop new medical categories of moral and mental disorder, thereby expanding medicine's jurisdiction over behavior traditionally seen as criminal. *Wieland* both enlists readers in applying diagnostic reasoning to characters' psychological states and problematizes the certainty of such diagnoses, emphasizing epistemological and ethical ambiguities in assessing mental pathology and culpability. The article argues that literature functioned not only as a partner to medical texts in authorizing surveillance of mental disorder but also as a space that deepened readers' active participation in interpreting and judging mental health in social contexts.