Henry Maudsley

Henry Maudsley (1835-1918) was an English psychiatrist and one of the pioneers of scientific psychiatry in Britain. His name lives on in the Maudsley Hospital in London and in the annual Maudsley Lecture of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.\n\nBorn on an isolated farm in Yorkshire, he qualified in medicine at University College London in 1857. At 23 he became medical superintendent of the Manchester Royal Lunatic Asylum at Cheadle Royal, near Manchester, and for fifteen years he co-edited the Journal of Mental Science. His best-known books include The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind (1867), Body and Mind (1870) and Mental Responsibility in Health and Disease (1874). After 1874 he largely withdrew from public life, devoting himself to writing and to a very profitable private practice.\n\nHe held that the mind depends on the brain and the body, and he embraced degeneration theory, the idea that inherited traits worsened over successive generations. Critical of religion and of supposedly supernatural phenomena, he later came to see degeneration as a threat to progress, a view that shaped some psychiatrists who favoured eugenics. His most visible legacy is the hospital that bears his name.