The British Journal of Psychiatry (2007) 191: A3. doi: 10.1192/bjp.191.1.A3
© 2007 The Royal College of Psychiatrists
Psychiatry in pictures
EDITED BY ALLAN BEVERIDGE
Do you have an image, preferably accompanied by 100 to 200 words of
explanatory text, that you think would be suitable for Psychiatry in Pictures?
Submissions are very welcome and should be sent direct to Dr Allan Beveridge,
Queen Margaret Hospital, Whitefield Road, Dunfermline, Fife KY12 0SU, UK.
View larger version (80K):
[in this window]
[in a new window]
[as a PowerPoint slide]
|
The Late Dr Conolly, Resident Physician of Hanwell Lunatic Asylum
(undated). Portrait by Messrs. Maull and Co. of Piccadilly and Cheapside.
Picture selection and text by Dr Elizabeth Tovey, Central and North West
London Mental Health Trust, and Dr Hagen Rampes, Barnet, Enfield and Haringey
Mental Health NHS Trust.
|
|
John Conolly (1794–1866) was responsible for abolishing the use of
restraint in the treatment of pauper patients at Hanwell Lunatic Asylum in the
1830s. He took the idea from Robert Gardiner Hill, a little-known house
surgeon from Lincoln. John Conolly's initial lack of success as both a
clinician and a lecturer did not deter him and he secured a job as resident
physician at Hanwell, a post that had previously eluded him. In his earlier
work he advocated community care and used the term `restraint' in its broader
sense of both the use of mechanical constraints and the removal of patients
from ordinary social life to confinement in an institution. He held that
admission should only occur after a careful examination of the patient by a
clinician with expertise in lunacy and that the asylum should be a place in
which medical men were taught to recognise and treat mental disorder.
Conolly's achievements at Hanwell increased his reputation and he was
eventually elected to the Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians in
1844. In 1856 he wrote The Treatment of the Insane without Mechanical
Restraints, which advocated `occupations' in the daytime, `evening
entertainments' and treating patients with `kindness'. Hunter and Macalpine
(Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1963) judged Conolly one of the
`outstanding figures' in the history of psychiatry, although Andrew Scull
(New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004) has provided a
more skeptical view.
Thanks to Ealing Local History Centre, Ealing Central Library, 103 Ealing
Broadway, London W5 5JY.
