Complete Record - Heirs of Hippocrates No. 2002

HENRY MAUDSLEY (1835-1918) The physiology and pathology of mind. Macmillan 1868 2nd ed., rev. xiv, 526 pp. 22.2 cm.

Maudsley was a top student in his medical class at the University of London and initially considered becoming a surgeon. After serving as house surgeon at University College Hospital, he decided to enter the Indian Medical Service and took a position at the Essex County Asylum in order to meet their requirement for experience in the management and treatment of mental diseases. As a result of that experience, he selected psychiatry as a career and went on to become medical superintendent to the Manchester Royal Lunatic Asylum. He also served as physician to the West London Hospital, professor of medical jurisprudence at London's University College, and editor of the Journal of mental science. Maudsley was a prolific writer on psychiatric subjects whose concepts of mental disease were very much like those of his German contemporary, Griesinger (see No. 1838). He believed that insanity was an organic disorder and rejected many of the theories of mental disease which had been postulated during the previous century. Maudsley first published the present work in 1866 at London and it had a lasting impact on the development of psychiatry. Aubrey Lewis, writing in the Journal of mental science stated that the work "was a turning point in English psychiatry; it presaged the end of the period in which psychiatry rested on a magma of empirical observations and windy philosophizing, and it embodied a critical synthesis of biological and other scientific advances so far as they had an evident bearing on mental activity, in health and disease" (Vol. 97 (April 1951), no. 407, p. 269).

See Related Record(s): 1838

Gift of John Martin, M.D.