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Henry Maudsley (5 February 183523 January 1918) was a pioneering English Psychiatry, commemorated in the Maudsley Hospital in London and in the annual Maudsley Lecture of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
Maudsley had apparently intended to pursue a career in surgery, but according to his autobiography, he changed his mind when he failed to receive a reply to his first application: it had gone to his previous address. He then decided to leave the country and work for the East India Company, although in the event he never did. It would require him first to do a stint in an asylum, and so he spent nine months at the West Riding Asylum in Wakefield, followed less happily by a shorter period at the Essex County Asylum in Brentwood. Masters of Bedlam: The Transformation of the Mad-Doctoring Trade Andrew Scull, Charlotte MacKenzie, Nicholas Hervey. Princeton University Press, 14 Jul 2014
At the age of 23, Maudsley was appointed medical superintendent at the small, middle-class Manchester Royal Lunatic Asylum in Cheadle Royal. Despite being relatively inexperienced clinically and administratively, he managed to raise patient numbers and income. He returned to London in 1862, taking up residence in Queen Anne St, Cavendish Square. In 1865 he failed to gain the position of Physician to the Bethlem Royal Hospital, but succeeded at the West London Hospital.
So ended Maudsley's relatively brief period in public and charitable asylums. In the same year he was appointed co-editor of the Journal of Mental Science, an influential position he retained for 15 years.
Maudsley was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and delivered their Gulstonian Lectures in 1870 on Body and Mind. The text of Maudsley's lectures was studied carefully by Charles Darwin in the preparation of his The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Maudsley was appointed Professor of Forensics at University College London from 1869 to 1879.Mary Elizabeth Leighton, Lisa Surridge. (2012). The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Prose, 1832–1901. Broadview Press. p. 197.
Maudsley married John Conolly's daughter, Ann Conolly, in February 1866, and from 1866 took over the running of Conolly's private mental asylum, Lawn House, housing six wealthy women, until 1874. He then withdrew from public life and focused on writing and on an extremely lucrative and secretive private consultancy for the very wealthy, often aristocratic, in the West End of London. Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England, 2012
Maudsley adhered to degeneration theory and believed that inherited "taints" were exaggerated through succeeding generations (Lamarckism). He argued that alcoholism was the most frequent trigger of inherited degeneracy, and that drunkenness in one generation would lead to frenzied need for drink in the second, hypochondria in the third, and idiocy in the fourth. DRUNKENNESS, DEGENERATION, AND EUGEMCS IN BRITAIN, 1900-1914 by Joanne Wolak Incest and Influence: The Private Life of Bourgeois England By Adam Kuper However, having significantly contributed to the British uptake of degeneration theory for over two decades, by the 1890s he was cautioning about it being used in a meaninglessly vague way.
His views on maternity have been critiqued for displaying a "revulsion to both parturition and the care of an infant," which he claimed was an expression of the rational objective truth. The Tyranny of the Maternal Body: Madness & Maternity Susan Hogan He was challenged even at the time for his generally negative views on women; a notable early critic was the pioneering female physician Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.
Maudsley has been described as "a prime example of how the medical establishment naturalised and reinforced social divisions and hierarchies during the latter part of the 19th century." The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, 2007 He has also been described as "consistently inconsistent".
Maudsley was agnostic, and as such critical of religion and reports of ostensibly supernatural phenomena. In his book Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings (1886) he wrote that so-called supernatural experiences were disorders of the mind and simply "malobservations and misinterpretations of nature".Ivan Leudar, Philip Thomas. (2000). Voices of Reason, Voices of Insanity: Studies of Verbal Hallucinations. Routledge. pp. 106–107. His book is seen as an early text in the field of anomalistic psychology.
Maudsley's £30,000 has been described as an astonishingly high sum, and he still had at least £60,000 spare upon his death. Henry Maudsley – psychiatrist, philosopher and entrepreneur by Trevor Turner In Anatomy of Madness.
A bronze bust of Maudsley overlooks the main staircase at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience next to the Maudsley Hospital.
While earlier he had argued, per Bénédict Morel, that degenerate families would die out, he would begin in the 1890s to consider degeneration as a regressive force and threat to evolution and moral progress. This appears to have had a significant influence on psychiatrists such as George Alder Blumer who became at least for some time converts to eugenics. Keeping America Sane: Psychiatry and Eugenics in the United States and Canada, 1880-1940
Maudsley's wife died before him, and they had no children.
He appears to have destroyed his own papers and correspondence.
Maudsley Hospital
In 1907, Maudsley collaborated with Frederick Mott, a neuropathologist, to make an offer to London County Council to found a new Maudsley Hospital, for which Maudsley donated £30,000, with the council finding another £30,000 plus. This was to be a new mental hospital that would treat early and acute cases and have an out-patient clinic. The hospital also housed teaching and research. The buildings were ready in 1915, temporarily used for war veterans, and officially opened in 1923. A special Act of Parliament had made voluntary treatment there financially possible. "The Maudsley Hospital, Past and Present," The Journal of Mental Science, Vol. LXVII, 1921.
Later life
In his later years, Maudsley became something of a recluse, resigning from the Medico-Psychological Association and, in some scattered writings, expressing regret at his career choice of psychiatry. He submitted articles to the philosophy journal Mind, watched cricket matches and sent postcards.
(1988). 9780422603508, Routledge. ISBN 9780422603508
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Categories: English Psychiatrists, 1835 Births, 1918 Deaths, Anomalistic Psychology, English Agnostics, British Sceptics, Critics Of Parapsychology, People Educated At Giggleswick School, People From Giggleswick, Alumni Of University College London, Academics Of University College London, History Of Mental Health In The United Kingdom
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