Henry Maudsley

Henry Maudsley (5 February 183523 January 1918) was a pioneering English psychiatrist, commemorated in the Maudsley Hospital in London and in the annual Maudsley Lecture of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

Life and career Maudsley was born on an isolated farm near Giggleswick in the North Riding of Yorkshire and educated at Giggleswick School. Maudsley lost his mother at an early age. An aunt cared for him, teaching him poetry which he would recite to the servants, and secured for him a top tutor and an expensive apprenticeship to University College London medical school. He earned ten gold medals and graduated with an M.D. degree in 1857, though is said to have avoided subjects and clinical work he found onerous and to have antagonised his teachers.

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 Medical Jurisprudence at University College London from 1869 to 1879.

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.

Influence Maudsley acquired a reputation as an outstanding essayist on medical and literary topics. An early success was a spectacular essay on Edgar Allan Poe.

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. 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. 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. He has also been described as "consistently inconsistent". His book is seen as an early text in the field of anomalistic psychology.

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.

Maudsley's £30,000 has been described as an astonishingly high sum, and he still had at least £60,000 spare upon his death.

A bronze bust of Maudsley overlooks the main staircase at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience next to the Maudsley Hospital.

Maudsley's wife died before him, and they had no children.

He appears to have destroyed his own papers and correspondence. Also available from "The Alleged Increase of Insanity", The Journal of Mental Science, Vol. XXIII, N°. 101, April 1877. "Hallucinations of the Senses", The Eclectic Magazine, Vol. XXVIII, July/December 1878. "Alleged Suicide of a Dog", Mind, Vol. 4, No. 15, Jul. 1879. "The Moral Sense and Will in Criminals", The Medico-Legal Journal, Vol. II, 1885. "The Physical Conditions of Consciousness", Mind, Vol. 12, No. 48, Oct. 1887. "Remarks on Crime and Criminals", The Journal of Mental Science, Vol. XXXIV, N°. 146, July 1888. "The Double Brain", Mind, Vol. 14, No. 54, April 1889. "The Physical Basis of Mind", The Forum, February 1891. "Memory" in Little Masterpieces of Science, George Iles, ed., Doubleday, Page & Company, 1902. "Optimism and Pessimism", The Journal of Mental Science, Vol. LXIII, N°. 260, January 1917. "Materialism and Spiritualism", The Journal of Mental Science, Vol. LXIII, October 1917.

Miscellany "An Address on Medical Psychology," The Journal of Mental Science, Vol. XVIII, 1873. "Introductory Lecture Delivered at University College, on October 2nd 1876," The Lancet, N°. 12, December 1876.