Abstract
In 1921, the publication of The Experiences of an Asylum Doctor by assistant medical officer Montagu Lomax caused a furore in British psychiatry and a sensation among the newspaper-reading public.1 The book launched an excoriating attack on the medical officers and staff at Prestwich Asylum in Lancashire, the largest in the country, where Lomax had worked as a locum from 1917 to 1919. Incompetent, self-serving superintendents were exposed. Ignorant and uncaring attendants denounced. Brutal practices laid bare. Lomax was roundly castigated by the Council of the Medico-Psychological Association and ferociously attacked in its journal, the Journal of Mental Science (JMS). The book was important at the time because, despite the posturing fulminations of medical men, it raised genuine concerns that ultimately led to the appointment by the Ministry of Health of a committee to investigate Lomax’s allegations.2 It is important to historians today because it provides a rare and detailed account of asylum life from the perspective of an ordinary asylum doctor, rather than one of the elite.3 Unlike asylum reports, written by superintendents to present their institutions in the best possible light, Lomax exposed the shadowy underside of a complex network of shifting relations that situated officers, staff and patients within a hierarchical structure that had been created inside a tightly circumscribed institutional setting.
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Notes
Montagu Lomax, The Experiences of an Asylum Doctor: With Suggestions for Asylum and Lunacy Law Reform (London: G. Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1921).
T. W. Harding, ‘“Not Worth Powder and Shot”: A Reappraisal of Montagu Lomax’s Contribution to Mental Health Reform’, The British Journal of Psychiatry (BJP), 156 (1990), 180–7.
Henry R. Rollin, ‘Psychiatry in Britain One Hundred Years Ago’, BJP, 183 (2003), 292–8, p. 298.
William Battie began to give lectures at St Luke’s Hospital in London in 1753, see Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997), 71
Joan Lane, A Social History of Medicine: Health, Healing and Disease in England, 1750–1950 (London: Routledge, 2001), 97.
Charles Mercier, Lunatic Asylums: Their Organisation and Management (London: Griffin & Co., 1894), 197.
See Keir Waddington, ‘Mayhem and Medical Students: Image, Conduct, and Control in the Victorian and Edwardian London Teaching Hospital’, Social History of Medicine, 15.1 (2002), 45–64, p. 63.
Robert Armstrong-Jones, ‘William, Joseph Seward’, JMS, 64 (1918), 245–6.
Geoffrey Wallis, ‘Sir Robert Armstrong-Jones’, Psychiatric Bulletin, 15 (1991), 432–3, p. 433; Bishop, rev by Hervey, ‘Jones, Sir Robert Armstrong’.
Hubert Bond, ‘Lieut-Col. Thomas Edward Knowles Stansfield, C.B.E., M.B. Edin. (late R.A.M.C)’ Obituary, JMS, 85 (1939), 1131–9
Charlotte Ellaby, ‘London School of Medicine for Women: The Student’s Career 1’, BMJ, 2.1814 (5 October 1895), 836–7, p. 836.
LCC Sixth Annual Report (1895), LMA 26.21, 49.
LCC Eighth Annual Report (1897), LMA 26.21, 49.
Louise Westwood, ‘A Quiet Revolution in Brighton: Dr Helen Boyle’s Pioneering Approach to Mental Health Care, 1899–1939’, Social History of Medicine, 14 (2001), 439–57, p. 441
A. Helen Boyle, ‘Some Points in the Early Treatment of Mental and Nervous Cases (with Special Reference to the Poor)’, JMS, 51 (1905), 676–81, pp. 680–1.
LCC Twelfth Annual Report (1901), LMA 26.21, 93.
Drs Dodds, Strahan and Greenlees, ‘Assistant Medical Officers in Asylums: Their Status in the Speciality’, JMS, 36 (1890), 43–50, p. 44.
E. W. Roughton, ‘An Address on Woman’s Sphere in Medicine. Delivered at the London School of Medicine for Women’, BMJ, 2.2597 (1910), 1027–9, p. 1027.
G. C. Paoli and Jas G. Kiernan, ‘Female Physicians in Insane Hospitals: Their Advantages and Disadvantages’, Alienist and Neurologist, 8 (1887), 21–9, pp. 21–2.
Constance M. McGovern, ‘Doctors or Ladies? Women Physicians in Psychiatric Institutions’, 1872–1900, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 55 (1981), 88–107, p. 92
Henry Burdett, Hospitals and Asylums of the World: Their Origin, History, Construction, Administration, Management, and Legislation, 4 vols, vol ii (London: Churchill, 1891), 18–19.
Frank Ashby Elkins, ‘Asylum Officials: Is it Necessary or Advisable for So Many to Live on the Premises?’, JMS, 54 (1908), 691–704, p. 695.
Aubrey Lewis, ‘Bond, Sir (Charles) Hubert (1870–1945), Psychiatrist and Mental Health Administrator’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004–10). http://via.oxforddnb.com. [accessed 24 January 2014].
Claybury Minute Book 4, 28 September 1893, LMA LCC/MIN/00918, 191; LCC Eleventh Annual Report (1900), LMA 26.21, 62.
Henry R. Rollin, ‘A Most Unusual Gift’, The Psychiatric Bulletin, 5 (1981), 114.
For a fascinating analysis of the organisation of spaces, see Daphne Spain, Gendered Spaces (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).
W. G. B. J., The Asylum News, 9.10 (1905), 96.
J. B. Spence, ‘Assistant Medical Officers in Asylums’, JMS, 59 (1913), 263–73, pp. 267–8.
In LCC-managed asylums with over 2,000 patients, the superintendent earned over £1,100 per annum, while his fifth AMO was paid just £150 per annum in 1901–2, see LCC Thirteenth Annual Report (1902), LMA 26.21, 64.
Ex-A.M.O., ‘The Appointment of Assistant Medical Officer at an Asylum’, The Lancet, 158 (26 October 1901), 1157.
Alannah Tomkins, ‘Mad Doctors? The Significance of Medical Practitioners Admitted as Patients to the First English County Asylums up to 1890’, History of Psychiatry, 23 (2012), 437–53, p. 439.
Lionel A. Weatherly, ‘The Trials and Troubles and Grievances of a Private Asylum Superintendent’, JMS, 40 (1894), 345–54.
A. R. Turnbull, ‘Female Nursing of Male Patients in Asylums’, JMS, 49 (1903), 629–40, p. 639.
Lee-Ann Monk, Attending Madness: At Work in the Australian Colonial Asylum (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 202.
Mrs Bedford Fenwick, ‘Editorial: The Control of the Domestic Department’, The British Journal of Nursing, 53 (1 August 1914), 93.
LCC Tenth Annual Report (1899), LMA 26.21, 67.
The MPA voted to admit women in 1893, see Westwood, ‘A Quiet Revolution’, 441; Helen A. Boyle, ‘“Watchman, What of the Night?”: The Presidential Address Delivered at the Ninety-Eighth Annual Meeting of the Royal Medico-Psychological Association, Held at Brighton, July 12, 1939’, JMS, 85 (1939), 858–70, p. 864.
LCC Tenth Annual Report (1899), LMA 26.21, 67.
Dav Nicolson, ‘William Orange, C.B., M.D., F.R.C.P.’, JMS, 63 (1917), 306–10.
LCC Thirteenth Annual Report (1902), LMA 26.21, 59.
Laura D. Hirshbein, ‘History of Women in Psychiatry’, Academic Psychiatry 28 (2004), 337–43, pp. 339–43.
T. E. Knowles Stansfield, ‘Acute Mental Hospitals and Psychiatric Clinics’, BMJ, 1.2736 (1913), 1248–9.
Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (London: Virago, 1992).
N. D. Jewson, ‘The Disappearance of the Sick-Man from Medical Cosmology, 1770–1870’, Sociology, 10.2 (1976), 225–44, p. 232.
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© 2014 Louise Hide
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Hide, L. (2014). Medical Officers. In: Gender and Class in English Asylums, 1890–1914. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137321435_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137321435_3
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