arrogate

I saw this word in an excellent article called In the Asylum the other day: "Among the best [critics of psychiatry] was the influential historian Andrew Scull, whose history of the origins of asylums, Museums of Madness, nevertheless implied that the arrogation of insanity to the purview of doctors in the eighteenth century did not grow out of any natural connection between the phenomena of madness and the endeavor of medicine..."