Chapter Seven
John Conolly: A Victorian Psychiatric Career

There is a venerable tradition of hagiography in the history of psychiatry (as in the histories of science and medicine). As psychiatric history has become less frequently the province of well-meaning amateurs, true consequence of their long-standing fixation on "great doctors and humanitarians" has been to make biographical studies a somewhat unfashionable, even disparaged form of inquiry. Prosopographical research, since it allows a measure of quantification and resolutely avoids focusing on the singular hero, has tot the most part been spared this stigma, and in the late 1970s it provided a vantage point from which a handful of doctoral students began to examine the early history of psychiatry.^[1] Such studies can unquestionably teach us a great deal,^[2] and it is a matter of regret that as yet their focus has been all but exclusively on American psychiatry.

Still, it would be foolish to think the only worthwhile form of biography is collective biography, or that a concentration on the individual precludes one from developing a greater understanding of larger themes

[1] For example, John Pitts, "The Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane, 1844–1892: A Case of Specialism in American Medicine" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1978); and Constance McGovern's University of Massachusetts Ph.D. dissertation, subsequently published in book form as Masters of Madness: Social Origins of the American Psychiatric Profession (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985).

[2] Splendid demonstrations of this, albeit focused on general medical practice rather than psychiatry, are provided by Irvine Loudon, Medical Care and the General Practitioner, 1750–1850 (Oxtord: Clarendon Press, 1986); and M. J. Peterson, The Medical Profession in Mid-Victorian London (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).

and issues. Over the past few years, some of the most valuable contributions to our understanding of medical responses to madness have come from those who have refused to be put off by the general prejudice against a focus on the individual practitioner: Michael MacDonald's pioneering foray into the casebooks of the astrologist-cum-magician-cum-healer-cum-physician-cum-divine, Richard Napier, to illuminate the nature of seventeenth-century English views of madness and its treatment; Nancy Tomes' examination of the treatment of well-to-do American mental patients through an examination of the life and career of Thomas Story Kirkbride, superintendent of the psychiatric branch of the Pennsylvania Hospital; and Samuel Shortt's study of the largely unremarkable, but (for that very reason) probably representative late-nineteenthcentury Canadian alienist, Richard Bucke.^[3]

John Conolly was anything but an unremarkable figure, and a study of him would clearly be mandatory for anyone fixated on the grand figures of nineteenth-century English psychiatry. But, paying due attention to the professional and social context of Conolly's life and career, one discovers that his biography teaches us a great deal about the larger issues associated with the emergence of a professionalized psychiatry in Victorian England. In my earliest researches for Museums of Madness, I necessarily devoted considerable time and attention to the surviving Hanwell records, not only because of the asylum's size and its metropolitan location, but also because of the great contemporary attention it drew as the inspiration for nonrestraint, the orthodoxy of nineteenthcentury English asylumdom. My interest in Conolly was still greater, because he occupied such a paradoxical role in the whole process of lunacy reform: the most formidable proselyte for the county asylum system in the 1840s, and yet a decade or so before, the most scathing critic of the emerging professional consensus about the necessity of the asylum in the treatment of mental disorder. How was one to account for such a puzzling transformation? The question fascinated me, and yet it was obviously tangential to the main thrust of the analysis I wanted to pursue in the hook. But over the next few years, I kept stumbling across additional materials that shed new light on the subject, while revealing that Conolly's career and intellectual development were even more convoluted than I had previously realized. Finally, when an extended stay in England allowed me to tie up some of the loose ends, I gave the project more sustained attention and was able to write up the following essay shortly after my return to San Diego.

[3] Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Nancy Tomes, A Generous Confidence: Thomas Story Kirkbridge and the Art of Asylum Keeping, 1840–1883 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); S. E. D. Shortt, Victorian Lunacy: Richard M. Bucke and the Practice of Late Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

John Conolly: A Victorian Psychiatric Career

We have in this asylum, Sir,
Some doctors of renown
With a plan of non-restraint
Which they seem to think their own.
All well-meaning men, Sir,
But troubled with a complaint
Called the monomania
Of total non-restraint.
—EPISTLE TO MR. EWART, M.P.,
by a Reverend Gentleman lately a patient in the Middlesex Asylum, 1841^[1]

John Conolly's place in the pantheon of heroes of English psychiatric history seems secure. Contemporaries likened his achievement in introducing nonrestraint in the treatment of the insane paupers at Hanwell Lunatic Asylum to Howard's labors in the cause of penal reform and Clarkson's role in the abolition of slavery.^[2] Lord Shaftesbury, for forty years the chairman of the English lunacy commissioners and chief spokesman for the lunacy reform movement, referred to Conolly's work as "the greatest triumph of skill and humanity" that the world had ever known.^[3] And the doyens of late-nineteenth-century medicine were only marginally less hyperbolic: for Sir James Crichton-Browne, "no member of his profession—except Jenner and Lister—has done a tithe as much as he to ward off and alleviate human suffering."^[4] "It is to Conolly," said Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson, "that we really owe the modern humane treatment of the insane as it exists today in all its beneficent ramifications. . . . The abolition of restraint . . . has placed us first among all the nations as physicians of medical disease."^[5] These are judgments that historians have for the most part been content to echo,^[6] crediting Conolly

[1] Quite possibly, the author of this piece of doggerel was actually the chaplain at Hanwell, one of several staff members who bitterly opposed Conolly's introduction of nonrestraint.

[2] The Lancet, 14 October 1843, 71–72, quoting the Morning Chronicle .

[3] House of Commons, Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Lunatics, with the Minutes of Evidence (1859), 45–49, evidence of Lord Shaftesbury.

[4] Sir James Crichton-Browne, Victorian Jottings (London: Etchells and MacDonald, 1926).

[5] Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson, "Medicine Under Queen Victoria; The First Advancement: The Treatment of the Insane," The Asclepiad (1877): 203–14.

[6] An exception is Dennis Leigh, The Historical Development of British Psychiatry (London: Pergamon Press, 1961).

with completing the work begun by Pinel and Tuke, by introducing "reforms which simultaneously gave freedom to the mentally ill and psychiatry to medicine."^[7]

But Conolly's medical career is too long and varied to be reduced to a simple tale of his triumph as the author of "nonrestraint." Quite apart from any other considerations, the system he is popularly assumed to have initiated^[8] was, as he periodically acknowledged, not his invention at all. Moreover, he was well into middle age before he became the resident physician at Hanwell, and he occupied that post for less than four years. A more extended look at his professional life provides valuable insight into some of the vicissitudes attending the choice of a medical career in Victorian England; and the sharp transformations that mark his thinking on psychiatric matters, closely paralleling the twists and turns of his own career, point up the intimate relationship that often exists between developments in disinterested medical "knowledge" and the varying social interests of those propounding it.

John Conolly was born at his grandmother's house in the small town of Market Rasen in Lincolnshire, in 1794. His father, "a younger son of a good Irish family . . . had been brought up to no profession; had no pursuits; [and] died young," leaving his wife with three young children to raise. The three boys were soon separated, and John, at the age of five, found himself boarded out, like "an inconvenient superfluity," with an elderly widow, a distant relative of the family, in the decaying borough of Hedon. Here he spent a "barren" and "wretched" boyhood, receiving a "dull, mechanical," and, as he later confessed, grossly inadequate education at the local grammar school. The descent from even a shabby gentility "to the commoner arrangements inseparable from school, and to a society of the lower kind, where nothing was tasteful, and nothing was beautiful, and nothing was cheerful"^[9] made a profound impression on Conolly. The experience may well have contributed to the insistent concern he displayed in his later years that others acknowledge his gentlemanly status; and they certainly must have intensified the pressures engendered by the uncertain course that marked his professional and financial life until the age of forty-five.

Conolly's mother had moved to Hull in 1803 and supported herself by opening a boarding school for "young ladies." Within a few years she

[7] Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, "Introduction" to John Conolly, An Inquiry Concerning the Indication of Insanity, facsimile ed. (London: Dawsons, 1964), 1.

[8] "[Conolly] originated a non-restraint movement which spread to all Europe and America. His follower, Robert Gardiner Hill (1811–1878), chief surgeon of the Lincoln Asylum,... wrote a good deal against any form of restraint" (Gregory Zilboorg, A History of Medical Psychology [New York: Norton, 1967], 387).

[9] John Conolly, "Autobiographical sketch," reprinted in Leigh, British Psychiatry, 211–15.

remarried, her new husband being a Mr. Stirling, an émigré Scot from Paris who taught languages; and in 1807, she brought her son John home to live with them. Despite the further decline in social status that these domestic arrangements implied, Conolly seems to have enjoyed the next five years. With his stepfather's encouragement, he became fluent in French, dabbled in Enlightenment philosophy, and obtained a rudimentary general and literary education. In 1812, at the age of eighteen, he procured a commission as an ensign in the Cambridgeshire militia and spent the closing years of the Napoleonic Wars in Scotland and Ireland. Apparently he found military life to his taste, tot Henry Maudsley reports enduring many conversations filled with "lively and pleasant recollections" of his service.^[10] Napoleon's defeat and exile, however, foreclosed the possibility of a military career, and by 1816, Conolly had resigned his commission and returned to Hull.^[11] With the death of his mother and stepfather he received a small inheritance, and in March of 1817, married Eliza Collins, daughter of the recently deceased Sir John Collins (himself the illegitimate son of the second Earl of Abermarle). Such an early marriage, with very little capital and no real prospects would by itself have struck most Victorians as foolhardy, and the couple quickly compounded their difficulties by the sort of financial ineptitude that Conolly was to exhibit throughout his life. After the marriage, they left immediately for France and spent an idyllic year in a cottage near Tours, on the banks of the Loire. At the end of this period, with the arrival of his first child and the rapid shrinking of his capital, it seems finally to have dawned on Conolly that he had to develop some stable source of income.

For those in early Victorian England who were without independent means but aspired to gentlemanly status, the choice of careers was meager indeed.^[12] Anything connected with "trade" was out of the question, leaving only law, the Church, and perhaps medicine as ways of gaining a livelihood without irrevocable loss of caste. Medicine, in fact, was not an unambiguously acceptable choice: as Trollope observed (in the person of Miss Marable), "She would not absolutely say that a physician was not a gentleman, or even a surgeon; but she would not allow to physic the absolute privilege which, in her eyes, helonged to the law and the church."^[13] Still, it was on medicine that Conolly settled (based in part on the advice of his older brother William, who was already medically qualified); and

[10] Henry Maudsley, "Memoir of the Late John Conolly," Journal of Mental Science 12 (1866): 161.

[11] Leigh, British Psychiaty, 216. Hunter and Macalpine, "Introduction," 4.

[12] M. Jeanne Peterson, The Medical Profession in Mid-Victorian London (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).

[13] Anthony Trollope, The Vicar of Bullhampton, quoted in Peterson, Medical Profession, 194.

like many an ill-connected and impecunious provincial, he elected to obtain his training in Scotland, first at Glasgow and then, for two years, at Edinburgh.

Possessed of a talent for making friends and for moving easily in society,^[14] Conolly enjoyed a moderately successful student career, becoming one of the four annual presidents of the Royal Medical Society in his second year. He was strongly influenced by Dugald Stewart, the professor of moral philosophy,^[15] and like a number of Edinburgh students of this period^[16] he developed a special interest in the problem of insanity. Reflecting this, his M.D. dissertation of 1821 was devoted to a brief discussion of De statu mentis in insania et melancholia .^[17]

He now had to earn his living and encountered immediately the dilemma of where to set up his practice. Lacking the means to buy into an established practice, and without any family ties he could call on to help obtain a clientele, Conolly faced an uphill battle.^[18] His difficulties were further compounded by the fact that he already had a wife and child to support. And since his Scottish training left him without any institutional or personal linkages to the London hospitals and medical elites, he had perforce to begin his career in a provincial setting. Inevitably, this meant engaging in general practice in an isolated and highly competitive environment,^[19] in which it generally took several years before one began to earn even a modest competence and where one was highly dependent

[14] Maudsley, "Memoir," 164.

[15] Leigh, British Psychiatry, 216.

[16] Alexander Crichton, John Haslam, and Thomas Arnold are among the best-known of his predecessors.

[17] Reminiscing at the end of his career, Conolly recalled: "My interest in the insane, and my observation of the phenomena of mental disturbance, began early, and became increased as years advanced . . . because the most active years of my life happened to be passed in a period signalised by an almost total change in the character of Lunatic Asylums. In the first year of my medical studies, my thoughts, which had previously and often been directed to metaphyscial reading, were more consistently directed to mental phenomena, and especially to those of minds in a disordered state, by an accidental visit to the old Lunatic Asylum of Glasgow—from which visit it has happened that all my subsequent lite has taken its colour. . . . The impression made in that and several other visits by the conversation of the patients, and by the several forms and degrees of eccentricity and unreason there witnessed, has never been effaced" (John Conolly, "Recollections of the Varieties of Insanity, Part I," Medical Times and Gazette 10 [1860]: 6–9).

[18] On the importance of possessing either a family tradition of medical practice and/or the means to short-circuit the otherwise laborious and uncertain business of building a general practice by purchasing an existing one, see Peterson, Medical Profession, passim, especially 91–98.

[19] Irvine Loudon's meticulous study of general practice from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century has recently demonstrated that the 1820s were an extraordinarily inhospitable period in which to try to launch a medical career, a time of unparalleled intraprofessional rivalry in a grossly overcrowded professional marketplace—an environment that fueled intense and bitter competition for patients and prosperity, with the ensuing struggle for survival proving too much for many of those entering upon it. See Irvine Loudon, Medical Care and the General Practitioner, 1750–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).

on somehow securing the approval and patronage of the well-to-do.^[20] To make matters worse, medical men working in such settings were regarded with ill-concealed contempt by the professional elites of Edinburgh and London, reflecting their marginal status in the larger social world. They were, sniffed the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, "engaged in the trading, money-making parts of the profession, and not one in a hundred of them distinguished by anything like science or liberality of mind."^[21]

Conolly's first efforts to make his way in this difficult environment met with abject failure. After a three-month stay in Lewes, he abandoned the attempt to build a practice there and removed his family to Chichester to try again. Here, however, he had to compete with another young practitioner, John Forbes.^[22] Though the two were to become lifelong friends, there was insufficient work to support them both, and within a year it had become apparent that it was Conolly who would have to leave. Of the two, he was undoubtedly "the greater favourite in society, his courteous manner, his vivacity of character, and his general accomplishments, rendered him an agreeable companion."^[23] But however enjoyable the local notables found his company, when they required professional medical services, they turned instead to Forbes. Conolly, as his son-in-law Henry Maudsley later remarked, was a poor "practical physician," with little talent or ability to inspire confidence in "the exact investigation of disease, or in its treatment; he had little faith in medicines, and hardly more faith in pathology, while the actual practice of his profession was not agreeable to him."^[24]

Now blessed (or burdened) with a second child, his son Edward Tennyson, Conolly once more uprooted his family and moved, this time to

[20] Peterson, Medical Profession, pp. 24–26. The situation had not changed much even forty years on: "The profession of a medical man in a small provincial town is not often one which gives to its owner in early lite a large income. Perhaps in no career has a man to work harder for what he earns, or to do more work without earning anything. It has sometimes seemed to me as though the young doctors and the old doctors had agreed to divide between them the different results of their profession—the young doctors doing all the work and the old doctors taking all the money" (Anthony Trollope, The Small House at Allington [London: Oxford University Press, 1980], 209).

[21] Edinburgh Medical and SurgicaI Journal 75 (1851): 255.

[22] In later Forbes was appointed physician to the queen's household. For his career, see Lives of the Fellows of the Royal College of Physicians of London, 1826–1925 (London: For the College, 1955), 34–35 (hereafter cited as Munk's Roll ).

[23] Maudsley, "Memoir," 164.

[24] Ibid., 172.

Stratford-upon-Avon, then a small town of some 4,000 inhabitants. Here he at last began to prosper, albeit in a very modest way. He was elected to the Town Council and twice served as mayor, the 80-pound salary serving as a useful supplement to his still slender professional income. He took a leading role in establishing a dispensary for the treatment of the sick poor and was active in civic affairs more generally, the well-worn path for a young practitioner trying to make his way.^[25] Perhaps because of the interest he had developed in the subject while in Edinburgh, and no doubt because the honorarium attached supplemented his inadequate income, he also secured an appointment as "Inspecting Physician to the Lunatic Houses for the County of Warwick," a position that required only that he accompany two local justices of the peace on their annual inspection of the county's half-dozen madhouses.

In his best year at Stratford, though, Conolly's income is reported "not to have exceeded 400 pounds," an amount barely sufficient to maintain a suitable life-style for a professional man with a growing family.^[26] Quite suddenly, however, the prospect arose of substituting the rewards of a London teaching and consulting practice for the dull routines of general practice in a provincial backwater. The founders of the new University of London had decided to include a medical school in the new foundation. Somewhat to his surprise, Conolly managed to obtain an appointment as professor of nature and treatment of diseases, helped in part by being previously known to Dr. George Birkbeck^[27] and Lord Brougham,^[28] two of the prime movers in the project. While the university had "sought to engage men of high standing,... it could offer but small emoluments and a precarious future" in its early years.^[29] And accordingly, a number of the early appointments were of young or relatively unknown men.^[30]

In general, however, "assured income and national visibility . . . went with status as full physician or surgeon at a hospital and as teacher at a

[25] Cf. Peterson, Medical Profession .

[26] On medical incomes in this period, cf. ibid., 207–24; and Loudon, Medical Care, chaps, 11 and 12.

[27] George Birkbeck (1776–1841), M.D., Edinburgh, 1799, was a friend of Brougham's at Edinburgh, famous for his role as the founder of mechanics' institutes, including the London Mechanics' Institute (now Birkbeck College).

[28] Lord Henry Brougham (1778–1868) was educated at Edinburgh University and was one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review . A barrister, Whig politician, and law reformer, he later served as lord chancellor in the Lord Grey and Melbourne administrations. Almost certainly, Conolly's Edinburgh connections helped secure Brougham's and Birkbeck's patronage.

[29] H. H. Bellot, University College London, 1826–1926 (London: University of London Press, 1929), 37.

[30] There were some famous names, however, including Charles Bell, A. T. Thomson, and D. D. Davis. For biographical details, see Munk's Roll .

medical school" in London,^[31] and Conolly undoubtedly thought that he was about to cross successfully the great divide that marked off the social and financial world of elite London physicians from the humble surroundings of the rest of the profession. He instantly wrote back accepting: "Gratified, as I cannot but be, by the confidence which has been placed in me, an untried person, I know that it only remains for me to justify it by my services."^[32] Though the first scheduled teaching session was not to begin until October 1828, some fourteen months hence, he at once refused offers to write and edit for London publishers on the grounds that "the attention and care required by the lectures of so inexperienced a teacher as I am . . . occupy almost every hour of my time."^[33] And toward the end of 1827, he announced plans to travel to Paris for three months to obtain materials that would assist him in preparing his lectures.^[34]

On 2 October, 1828, Conolly gave his inaugural lecture, the second at the new medical school.^[35] It was apparently quite successful,^[36] although largely given over to some rather platitudinous advice to his students. He informed them:

I have watched with some interest, the fate and conduct of many of those who were pursuing their studies at the same time as myself. Of these, some were of course idle, and despised the secluded pursuits of the studious; I do not know one whose progress has been satisfactory: many of them, after trying various methods of dazzling the public, have sunk, already, into merited degradation. But I do not know one among the industrious, who has not attained a fair prospect of success; many of them have already acquired it; and some of them will doubtless be the improvers of their science in our own day, and remembered with honour when they are dead.^[37]

Naturally enough, Conolly aspired to belong to the latter group. Nevertheless, his lecture's one departure from the expected was an announcement that "it is my intention to dwell somewhat more fully on Mental Disorders, or to speak more correctly, of disorders affecting the mani-

[31] Peterson, Medical Profession, 161.

[32] Conolly to Leonard Horner, 21 July 1827, College Collection, University College London Library (hereafter cited as UCL).

[33] Conolly [to Messrs. Longman], 21 July 1827; 28 May 1828, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine Collection, London. See also Conolly to Thomas Coates, 3 April 1828: "I cannot at present let anything draw my attention away from my University duties" (Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge Collection [hereafter cited as SDUK Coll.], UCL).

[34] Conolly to Leonard Horner, 26 September 1827; 7 November 1827, UCL.

[35] He had been preceded by Charles Bell.

[36] Morning Chronicle, 3 October 1828, 3A; 4 October 1898, 2D. See also The Life and Times of Henry Brougham by Himself (London: Blackwood, 1871), 2: 498–99.

[37] John Conolly, An Introductory Lecture Delivered in the University of London, October 2, 1828 (London: Taylor, 1828), 23.

festations of the mind than has, I believe, been usual in lectures on the practice of medicine."^[38] Conolly's attempts, over the next two years, to get permission to give students clinical instruction in mental disorders at a London asylum proved unavailing. After initially encouraging him, the University Council rejected the idea.^[39] Thwarted in this direction, he decided instead to publish a book on the subject, not least because "I disapprove entirely of some part of the usual management of lunatics."^[40]

An Inquiry Concerning the Indications of Insanity, published in 1830, is, in many respects, a rather conventional treatise, "investigating the mind's history, from its most perfect state, through all its modifications of strength and through all its varieties of disease, until it becomes affected with confirmed madness."^[41] But Conolly broke sharply with contemporary orthodoxy over the key issue of how and where the lunatic ought to be treated. His book appeared in the midst of the early-nineteenth-century campaign for "reform" in the treatment of lunatics—a movement that took some thirty years to achieve its goals, and one whose proponents were absolutely convinced that asylum care was the only appropriate form of treatment for the insane. The heightened public attention to the problems posed by the mentally disturbed stimulated a large number of medical men to produce books and pamphlets on insanity, and running through this literature, and repeated with growing emphasis and conviction, was the assertion that all forms of madness required institutional care and treatment and that the sooner those displaying signs of mental imbalance were removed from domestic to asylum care, the greater their chances of ultimate recovery.^[42]

From this almost universal consensus about "the improbability (I had almost said moral impossibility) of an insane person's regaining the use of his reason, except by removing him early to some Institution for that purpose,"^[43] Conolly issued a lengthy and closely argued dissent. Seeking to offer "no opinions which have not received some confirmation from observation and experience,"^[44] he asserted that the emphasis on the centrality of the asylum "originated in erroneous views of mental disorders, and has been perpetuated with such views."^[45] Existing authorities ar-

[38] Ibid., 16. See also University of London, Second Statement by the Council of the University of London Explanatory of the Plan of Instruction (London: Longman, 1828), 150.

[39] Maudsley, "Memoir," 165–66.

[40] Conolly, Introductory Lecture, 16–17.

[41] Review of An Inquiry into the Indications of Insanity, Medicochirurgical Review 13 (1830): 289–308.

[42] On these developments, see generally Andrew Scull, Museums of Madness: The Social Organization of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Allen Lane; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979), esp. chap. 3.

[43] Robert Gardiner Hill, A Lecture on the Management of Lunatic Asylums, and the Treatment of the Insane (London: Simpkin Marshall, 1839), 4–5.

[44] Conolly, Indications of Insanity, 9.

[45] Ibid., 31.

gued that any and all forms of mental unsoundness warranted—indeed required—confinement. If this doctrine of "indiscriminate treatment, including deprivation of property and personal liberty," were to prevail, then, said Conolly,

no man can be sure that he may not, with a full consciousness of his sufferings and wrongs, be one day treated as if all sense and feeling were in him destroyed and lost; torn from his family, from his home, from his innocent and eccentric pursuits, and condemned, for an indefinite period, to pass his melancholy days among the idiotic and the mad."^[46]

"Restraint," as he saw it, was "seldom apportioned to the individual case, but is indiscriminate and excessive and uncertain in its termination."^[47] (Later in Conolly's career, restraint was to acquire a narrower meaning, referring to the use of chains, straitjackets, and the like to impose physical controls on the insane, but here, significantly, it is used in the broad sense of removal from ordinary social life and confinement in an institution.) It was precisely the expert's task, not just to distinguish the mad from the sane, but "to point out those circumstances which, even in persons decidedly insane, can alone justify various degrees of restraint."^[48] And the latter was clearly the more difficult accomplishment. At present, "certificates of insanity" were heedlessly and ignorantly . . . signed,"^[49] with the result that "the crowd of most of our asylums is made up of odd but harmless individuals, not much more absurd than numbers who are at large."^[50] Moreover,

once confined, the very confinement is admitted as the strongest of all proofs that a man must be mad. . . . It matters not that the certificate is probably signed by those who know very little of madness or of the necessity of confinement; or by those who have not carefully examined the patient; a visitor hesitates to avow, in the face of such a document, what may be set down as a mere want of penetration in a matter wherein nobody seems in doubt but himself; or he may be tempted to affect to perceive those signs of madness that do not exist.^[51]

Hence, the central importance of clinical instruction of medical students in the recognition and treatment of insanity. As the medical curriculum was presently constructed,

during the term allotted to medical study, the student never sees a case of insanity, except by some rare accident. . . . The first occurrence, consequently, of a case of insanity, in his own practice, alarms him: he . . . has recourse to indiscriminate and, generally, to violent or unnecessary means; or gets rid of his anxiety and his patient together, by signing a certificate, which commits the unfortunate person to a mad house.^[52]

[46] Ibid., 8–9.

[47] Ibid., 6.

[48] Ibid., 1.

[49] Ibid., 28.

[50] Ibid., 17.

[51] Ibid., 4–5.

[52] Ibid., 2.

Such an outcome might be avoided by teaching students not only how to solve the relatively simple problem of distinguishing those of unsound mind, but also how to decide "whether or not the departure from sound mind be of such a nature to justify the confinement of the individual, and the imposition of restraint upon him, as regards the use or disposal of his property ."^[53]

The task was rendered the more urgent because asylum treatment was, as he saw it, more pernicious than beneficial. Perhaps a trifle disingenuously, Conolly announced that he had "no wish to exaggerate the disadvantages of lunatic asylums."^[54] There were, after all, certain classes of patients for whom public asylums were "unavoidable evils."^[55] "For a hopeless lunatic, a raving madman, for a melancholy wretch who seems neither to see nor to hear, or for an utter idiot, a lunatic asylum is a place which affords all the comforts of which unfortunate persons are capable."^[56] But their regrettable necessity as places of last resort must not be allowed to obscure the fact that

it is a tar different place for two-thirds of those who are confined there. . . . To all these patients confinement is the very reverse of beneficial. It fixes and renders permanent what might have passed away and ripens eccentricity or temporary excitement or depression, into actual insanity.^[57]

The first principle of asylum treatment was the isolation of the mad from the sane. This sequestration from the world was alleged to be therapeutic, a notion Conolly scathingly attacked: "Whatever may be said, no one in his senses will believe, that a man whose mind is disordered is likely in any stage of his disorder to derive benefit from being surrounded by men whose mental faculties are obscured, whose passions and affections are perverted, and who present to him, in place of models of sound mind, in place of rational and kind associates, in place of reasonable and judicious conversation, every specimen of folly, of melancholy, and of extravagant madness."^[58] People's mental and moral capacities varied markedly according to the circumstances in which they were placed, and their thoughts and actions were, in large degree, the product of an interaction between habits, situational pressures, and the influence and reactions of their associates. The capacity to control one's wayward passions and imagination and to avoid the perils of morbid introspection^[59] was thus essentially dependent on social reinforcement and support. Granting these realities of our mental life,

[53] Ibid., 35 (emphasis in the original).

[54] Ibid., 25.

[55] Ibid., 7.

[56] Ibid., 17.

[57] ibid., 17–18.

[58] Ibid., 30–31.

[59] Michael Clark, "Victorian Psychiatry and the Concept of Morbid Introspection," (Paper, Oxford University, 1981). A published version of this paper will appear in The Anatomy of Madness, ed. W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd, vol. 3 (London: Tavistock, 1988).

who can fail to perceive that in such an unhappy situation [as asylum life provided] the most constant and vigorous assertion of his self-command would be required to resist the horrible influences of the place;—a place in which a thousand fantasies, that are swept away almost as soon as formed in the healthy atmosphere of our diversified society, would assume shapes more distinct; a place in which the intellectual operations could not but become, from mere want of exercise, more and more inert; and the domination of wayward feelings more and more powerful.^[60]

Taking even "the most favourable case for the asylum," its effects were likely to be harmful.^[61]

Of course, the men running such places sought to reject these charges. They claimed that the inmates of the asylums were not abandoned and subjected to a pernicious atmosphere of uncontrolled ravings and delusions, but were carefully monitored and controlled by a sane superintendent and judiciously coaxed and encouraged to resume an independent, self-governing existence. Conolly remained unconvinced:

To say that persons in this state are not left, are not abandoned, is by no means satisfactory to those who have opportunities of knowing how little of the time of the superintendent is, or can be, commonly devoted to the professed objects of his care, and yet who, like children, demand constant watching and attention.^[62]

Hence the "numerous examples" to be found "in which . . . a continued residence in the asylum was gradually ruining the body and the mind."^[63]

To some extent, the antitherapeutic effects of the asylum derived from "the monotonous wretchedness of the unhappy patient's existence; debarred from home, from the sight of friends, from the society of their families; . . . shut out from even a hope of any change that might prove beneficial to them."^[64] But criticisms of this sort suggested that a more enlightened and flexible administration, and the provision of more varied amusements and diversions, could obviate the difficulty. They could not. Superintendents, some of whom

are men of great intelligence and humanity, . . . may point to the spaciousness of their grounds, to the variety of occupations and amusements prepared for their patients, to the excellence of their food and the convenience of their lodging; and urge that as little restraint is employed as is compatible with their safety: but the fault of the association of lunatics with each other, and the infrequency of any communication between the patient and persons of sound mind, mars the whole of the design.^[65]

The defect was thus, as Conolly saw it, a structural one, and hence not removable by any conceivable reform. Confinement in an institution

[60] Conolly, Indications of Insanity, 22–23.

[61] Ibid., 18.

[62] Ibid., 19–20.

[63] Ibid., 20.

[64] Ibid., 21.

[65] Ibid., 31.

acted like a self-fulfilling prophecy, intensifying and even creating the very behaviors that were its alleged justification:

The effect of living constantly among mad men and women is a loss of all sensibility and self-respect or care; or not infrequently, a perverse pleasure in adding to the confusion and diversifying the eccentricity of those about them. . . . In both cases the disease grows inveterate. Paroxysms of violence alternate with tits of sullenness; both are considered further proofs of the hopelessness of the case.^[66]

For whole classes of lunatics, therefore, asylum treatment was grossly inappropriate. Given that "so long as one lunatic associates with another, supposing the case is to be curable, so long must the chances of restoration to sanity be very materially diminished,"^[67] recent and curable cases did not belong in an institution. This was particularly the case "during the mental weakness of their convalescence," when confinement exposed them to "the presence of a company of lunatics, their incoherent talk, their cries, their moans, their indescribable utterances of all imaginable fancies or their ungovernable frolics and tumult." These, said Conolly, "can have no salutary effect on a mind just reviving from long depression."^[68] On the contrary, they were "the very circumstances most likely to confuse or destroy [even] the most rational and healthy mind."^[69]

Another class of patients for whom a lunatic asylum is a most improper place consists of those who, in various periods of life become afflicted with various degrees of weakness of intellect. . . . But there is little or no extravagance of action, still less is there anything in the patient which would make his liberty dangerous, or, if he were properly attended to and watched, even inconvenient to others or himself.^[70]

Such patients, along with the chronically insane, were subject to a more insidious but equally debilitating and damaging effect of confinement in an institution, the gradual atrophy of their social capacities: "After many hopeless years, such patients become so accustomed to the routine of the house, as to be mere children, and are content to remain there, as they commonly do, until they die."^[71]

If social practices could be brought to reflect these realities, "the patients out of the asylum being the majority, and consisting of all whose circumstances would insure them proper attendance—better arrangements might be made for the smaller number of public asylums, or central houses of reception."^[72] Such asylums must, first of all, he public, that is, state supported, for only by removing the distorting effects of the profit motive could one avoid the problems created by a system in which "the patients are transmitted, like stock-in-trade, from one member of a

[66] Ibid., 22.

[67] Ibid., 29.

[68] Ibid., 26.

[69] Ibid., 23.

[70] Ibid., 29–30.

[71] Ibid., 21.

[72] Ibid., 483.

family to another, and from one generation to another": a free trade in lunacy that attracts, besides a handful of "respectable, well-educated, and humane individuals," the "ignorant and ill-educated" and those "capable of no feeling but a desire for wealth."^[73] Second, each asylum should become a center in which aspiring medical men could be taught to recognize and treat mental disorder.^[74] The possession of such Clinically derived skills and knowledge—the fruit of the sort of arrangement he had unsuccessfully urged on the university—would give the average medical practitioner both the competence and the confidence to treat most cases of insanity on a domiciliary basis.

If Conolly hoped that the publication of An Inquiry Concerning the Indications of Insanity would serve to advance his reputation and enlarge his private practice, he was soon disabused. One reviewer, in the Medical-Chirurigical Review, did praise him for performing "a very important service to the profession, in calling their attention to the construction and properties of the mind," and for the superior "language and style" in which he expressed himself.^[75] But for the most part, Conolly's suggestions were not even debated,^[76] but simply ignored. For by now the overwhelming weight of opinion among both the profession itself and those laymen interested in lunacy reform was that in cases of insanity, asylum treatment was indispensable and could not be embarked upon too quickly for the patient's own good—a position Conolly himself was to embrace less than a decade later.

In the meantime, he was involved in a series of controversies at the medical school, that within six months, were to prompt his resignation. The early years of the university were stormy ones. The council, chosen from among the university's proprietors, exhibited a constant disposition to interfere with the conduct of the institution, threatening to send inspectors to check on the quality of lectures given, to exercise the power to censor the books used in teaching, and "to regulate minutely not only the number, length, and hours, but also the scope and content of the various courses."^[77] In general, "it regarded the professors in the same light as any other of its employees, and all its employees with suspi-

[73] Ibid., 13–14.

[74] Ibid., 7, 37–38.

[75] Mediochirurgical Review 13 (1830): 289–308.

[76] The German alienist Maximilian Jacobi did object a few years later that "Doctor Conolly takes occasion . . . to recommend the treatment of such persons in their own houses in far too unconditional a manner, and without any adequate consideration of the objections against" and insisted on the value of asylum treatment (Jacobi, On the Construction and Management of Hospitals for the Insane [London: Churchill, 1841], 77–80 [the original German ed., 1834]). But such direct attempts to refute Conolly's claims were otherwise notable by their absence.

[77] Bellot, University College London, 191.

cion."^[78] The friction such conduct was sure to arouse was exacerbated by the activities of the warden, Leonard Horner, the salaried officer to whom the council had delegated day-to-day supervision of university affairs. For Horner, too, had an exalted view of his position, and his arrogant and autocratic manner, his constant petty interference and intrigue aroused widespread discontent among the professoriate—an antipathy strengthened by the fact that the warden, though paid four or five times as much as those he supervised, was an erstwhile linen manufacturer possessed of limited education and no scholarly qualifications.^[79]

The medical faculty considered that "a Hospital is absolutely necessary for the prosperity of the Medical School,"^[80] since only by providing clinical instruction could they hope to compete effectively with rival London institutions for students. For a time it appeared that a suitable arrangement could be reached with the nearby London Fever Hospital, but when the council insisted on being given complete control, its intransigence led to the collapse of the negotiations. As a temporary, if inadequate, substitute, Conolly and his colleagues proposed the establishment of a university dispensary, which they would attend "without compensation . . . as a help to a rising school"^[81] —a plan to which the parsimonious council quickly agreed.^[82] But the dispensary soon became a new source of friction. It was to have a resident apothecary, and Conolly and his colleague Anthony Todd Thomson immediately expressed concern that the appointee be someone who aspired "solely to being efficient in that useful but still subordinate capacity."^[83] Their concern to protect their status soon proved prescient, for Horner began to use John Hogg, who had secured the position, to check on the professors' performance of their duties. Conolly viewed such "very offensive" machinations as an intolerable affront to his dignity:

You have constituted the Apothecary, who ought to be under the orders of the physicians and surgeons, a kind of spy over those physicians and

[78] Ibid.

[79] Ibid., 193–96. Leonard Horner (1785–1864) was born and educated in Edinburgh. An active Whig politician with a notoriously great respect for "people of station and property," he was, like his older brother Francis, one of Brougham's intimate circle—which doubtless explains his appointment as warden. Following his resignation from that position, in March 1831, he was to achieve fame tot his role as one of the chief inspectors under the Factories Act, a position he occupied until 1856. For details of his life, see Katherine M. Lyell (ed.), Memoir of Leonard Horner, Edited by his Daughter, 2 vols. (London: Women's Printing Society, 1890).

[80] University College, London, Minute-Book of the Faculty of Medicine, Inaugural Meeting, 26 October 1987.

[81] Conolly to Horner, 10 July 1830, UCL.

[82] Hunter and Macalpine, "Introduction," 25–26.

[83] Conolly to Horner, 18 August 1828, UCL.

surgeons, and have thereby completely subverted the discipline of the establishment. Among respectable men of my own rank in the medical profession, I find but one opinion concerning this matter; and that opinion makes it impossible for me to continue my attendance at the Dispensary. . . . The Council have no right to impose a degradation on me, and I cannot submit to it.^[84]

Two months later, Horner informed him that "the Council considered it a part of the duty of the Professor of the Practice of Medicine to attend as Physician at the Dispensary."^[85] But Conolly stood his ground: "No opinion of the Council, or of any body of men, can, or ever shall, induce me to act inconsistently to my character as a physician and a gentleman." Only a change in the lines of authority at the dispensary would induce him to return.^[86] Eventually a meeting with the council itself led to the quarrel being patched up, though not until Conolly had incurred further slights from the warden.^[87]

On other fronts, too, the relationship between the university and its professors grew strained. The proprietors wished to move to a system in which a professor's pay was directly proportional to the income he generated from his lectures. Initially, they had been forced to modify this plan in order to attract faculty to a new and untried enterprise, offering salary guarantees for the first three years of the university's existence. By the spring of 1830, however, financial difficulties were increasing as student numbers declined, and "the University was eating up its capital at a rate of 1,000 pounds a year."^[88] Rumors began to circulate that the council was contemplating an early end to the system of guaranteed salaries. A number of professors, Conolly among them, responded by laying out an alternative plan to rescue the institution's finances. They insisted that "a salary should be secured for every professor in the event of his fees from pupils not attaining a certain amount," arguing that the institution was still too new for payment by results to work and that the failure to provide such a guarantee would inhibit the professors' study of their subjects, since such activities would be "unproductive of immediate pecuniary advantage."^[89] Some professors' lectures fees amounted to less than 100 pounds, of which the university proposed to take a third, and yet "it is expected that the professor will subsist in the rank of a gentleman upon the balance." To balance the budget, they proposed tailoring

[84] Conolly to the University Council, 5 May 1830, see also John Hogg to L. Horner, 8 May 1830, UCL.

[85] Horner to Conolly, 8 July 1830, UCL.

[86] Conolly to Horner, 10 July 1830, UCL.

[87] Ibid., 19 July 1830.

[88] Bellot, University College London, 177.

[89] A Letter to the Shareholders and Council of the University of London on the Present State of that Institution (London: Taylor, 1830), 12–15.

the length of courses to the convenience of students, since the university could not expect, "for many years to come, to draw any considerable number of students from the upper ranks [of society]";^[90] and reducing fees so as to attract additional students who would otherwise attend the cheaper courses given by such places as the Royal Institution and the London Institute. Finally, a great deal of money could be saved by abolishing the office of warden, with his salary of 1,200 pounds a year (a suggestion scarcely inclined to endear its authors to Horner). These proposals were leaked to the press and met by anonymous responses from the warden, a war of words that continued until 21 April 1830, when the Sun reported that with some lecture rooms all but empty, the proprietors had decided to reduce the salary guarantees to the least successful professors.^[91]

This news must have been a considerable blow to Conolly, for his financial situation had been precarious since his arrival in London. On the same day that the new salary policy was announced, he wrote to Horner declining to repeat the summer session lectures he had given the year before, partly because the number of students was likely to be small, rendering the course unremunerative, and also because "I am under the necessity of employing some of the year in occupations unconnected, or not immediately connected, with my Professorship, which I could not possibly do if I were to lecture ten months out of twelve."^[92] During the 1829–30 session, his university salary declined from 300 pounds to 272 pounds, 15 shillings, and before the year was out, he was forced to request an advance of "100 pounds on account" from the warden he detested,^[93] a humiliation he was compelled to undergo twice more before he finally left London the following spring?.^[94]

Conolly could scarcely have viewed the prospect of a further decline in his guaranteed salary with equanimity, for, notwithstanding all his laborious preparation and his personal charm, his lectures "were not great successes, if they were not in truth failures, [being] somewhat vague and diffuse, wanting in exact facts and practical information."^[95] Here, as elsewhere, in the judgment of one of his friends, "the aid which Dr. Conolly rendered to the diffusion of knowledge was not special or professional."^[96] Unfortunately, his efforts to augment his income from private practice were likewise unsuccessful. Conolly was blessed with consider-

[90] Ibid., 23, 28.

[91] The Sun, 21 April 1830, 4, col. D.

[92] Conolly to Horner, 21 April 1830, UCL.

[93] Ibid., 16 November 1830.

[94] Ibid., 1 March 1831; 28 April 1831.

[95] Maudsley, "Memoir," 172.

[96] Charles Knight, Passages from a Working Life, quoted in Leigh, British Psychiatry, 219. Hunter and Macalpine ("Introduction," 32) have disputed this negative verdict on Conolly's capacities as a lecturer, but it must be said that the four lectures he committed to print (John Conolly, Four Lectures on the Study and Practice of Medicine [London: Sherwood, Gilbert and Piper, 1832]) serve only to confirm the accuracy of Maudsley's claim that they were "vague and discursive."

able advantages that ought to have brought him patients: Lords Russell, Auckland, and Brougham provided aristocratic sponsorship; his university affiliation ought for once to have been an advantage; and he was amply provided with the necessary social graces.

Though by nature passionate and impetuous, he had great command over his manner which was courteous in the extreme. Indeed he never failed to produce, by the suavity of his manner and the grace and ease of his address, the impression of great amiability, kindness, and unaffected simplicity; while his cheerful and vivacious disposition and his lively conversational powers rendered him an excellent social companion."^[97]

He sought to capitalize on these advantages, following the well-worn path of the aspiring London practitioner. He joined the Medical and Chirurgical Society of London, and became an active member of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. He took the examination of the Royal College of Physicians and became a licentiate; and he secured election to the staff of the London Fever Hospital. Notwithstanding all his efforts, however, "practice did not come sufficiently quickly."^[98] On a larger stage, he experienced a repetition of his failures at Lewes and Chichester, and almost certainly for the same reasons: his own deficiencies in the investigation of disease, his evident lack of faith in the medicine he prescribed, and his dislike of the tasks medical practice imposed, coupled with his settled disposition "to shrink from the disagreeable occasions of life, if it were possible, rather than encounter them with deliberate and settled resolution."^[99]

Unlike the deficiencies of some of his colleagues, at least Conolly's failures were not the focus of public attention. Granville Sharp Pattison, the professor of anatomy, was not so fortunate. Having been one of Conolly's teachers at Glasgow, he had subsequently emigrated to the United States to an appointment at the University of Maryland. Apparently his tenure there was less than an overwhelming success (he was attacked in a pamphlet published in Philadelphia as "an adventurer with a tainted

[97] Maudsley, "Memoir", 173–74.

[98] Obituary of John Conolly, Journal of Mental Science 12 (1867): 148.

[99] Maudsley, "Memoir," 172–73. Cf. Sir George Thane's comments: "In spite of the friendship of Lord Brougham, Lord John Russell, and other very influential men, John Conolly failed to practice as a London physician, nor does it appear that his duties were performed with any distinguished ability" (Thane, Medical Biographies, quoted in Kathleen Jones, Lunacy, Law, and Conscience, 1744–1845: The Social History of the Care of the Insane [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955], 154).

reputation"),^[100] but he succeeded in securing one of the first chairs at the University of London, Conolly providing a testimonial in his behalf. The appointment proved to be a mistake. He neglected his work or performed it incompetently, giving superficial and perfunctory lectures when he bothered to attend. By contrast, J. R. Bennett, who had been appointed demonstrator in anatomy and had previously taught in Paris, "was a competent and popular teacher, and came to feel a contempt for Pattison as an anatomist which he was at no pains to conceal."^[101] Conflict flared in the very first session and continued intermittently for more than two years. Pattison at first secured the support of many of his colleagues by alleging that Horner, whom they detested, was plotting his removal. But by the spring of 1830, student complaints about his performance grew more insistent, and the scandal surfaced in the medical press. A student memorial published in the London Medical and Surgical Journal "charge[d] him with unusual ignorance of old notions, and total ignorance of and disgusting indifference to new anatomical views and researches. . . . He is ignorant, or, if not ignorant, indolent, careless, and slovenly, and above all, indifferent to the interest of science."^[102]

Conolly remained one of Pattison's staunchest supporters. He complained to the council that "the most heartless and iniquitous persecution has been carried on against the Professor of Anatomy . . . because his ruin would be convenient to the Warden's friends."^[103] And for a few months, Pattison managed to cling to his position. But when the new session opened in October 1830, student discontent grew increasingly unmanageable. Pattison's classes were periodically boycotted and routinely disorderly. By February 1831, the students had opted for open rebellion, and "for over a month it was impossible to lecture. The scenes in the anatomy theatre reminded a contemporary reporter of Covent Garden during O. P. [Old Price] riots."^[104] Conolly, too, began to lose control of some of his students, and on at least one occasion, nearly half of his class failed to attend his lecture.^[105] Ultimately, the tumult subsided only after Horner abruptly relinquished his post and Pattison was forced to resign.^[106] By then Conolly, too, had left the university.

Pattison was not the only colleague of doubtful competence whom Conolly sought to defend. His intervention on behalf of John Gordon Smith proved similarly unavailing, perhaps not surprisingly in view of its

[100] Correspondence Between Mr Granville Sharp-Pattison and Dr Nathaniel Chapman, 3d ed. (Philadelphia: Webster, 1821).

[101] Bellot, University College, 198–99.

[102] London Medical and Surgical Journal 5 (1 November 1830): 443–48.

[103] Quoted in Hunter and Macalpine. "Introduction," 29.

[104] Bellot, University College London, 207–8.

[105] Conolly to Horner, 30 March 1831; 8 April 1831, UCL.

[106] For a fuller version of these events, see Bellot, University College London, chap. 6.

maladroitness. Smith was a former army surgeon who had secured an appointment as professor of medical jurisprudence. A knowledge of forensic medicine conferred few obvious advantages on those seeking to practice medicine, and Smith's prospects of attracting a sufficient number of students to his classes were not aided by his rambling and disjointed lecture style. "Condensation . . . is not a virtue of Dr. Smith's," the Morning Chronicle commented on the occasion of his inaugural lecture,^[107] and students voted with their feet not to listen to interminable stories of his wartime exploits. In early December 1830, while depressed and in his cups, he offered the council his resignation; then on sobering up, sought to withdraw it. Conolly's intervention can only have sealed his fate. He had been treating Smith, he informed the council, for a periodic "severe affection of the stomach" (most probably this was a side effect of Smith's heavy drinking). These episodes lasted for only a few days at a time, but

on the decline of each attack, he is subject to a peculiar, but temporary, excitement of the nervous system which has once or twice, I believe, led to the interference of his friends. It was during one of these afflicting accessions that he lately conveyed to you his determination not to lecture in the University unless certain concessions were made to which he has ceased to attach any importance; and I know that he unfeignedly and extremely laments that he made such a communication to you.^[108]

Lament he might, for the council, notwithstanding Conolly's warning that the loss of Smith's chair would be "an irretrievable, perhaps a ruinous calamity to him,"^[109] gratefully accepted the opportunity to be rid of him. (Conolly, incidentally, proved a better prophet than advocate: within three years, Smith was dead, dying of alcoholism in a debtor's prison.)^[110]

Conolly's manifold failures and disappointments make his resignation from the university not unexpected, but its manner and timing were nevertheless distinctly odd, lending weight to Maudsley's observation that he was "apt to do serious things in an impulsive way."^[111] Only a few hours after sending a letter to the council begging it to ignore Smith's resignation, Conolly submitted his own. Bellot comments that "the reasons for Conolly's resignation are obscure,"^[112] and Conolly himself, in requesting Horner "to lay my resignation before the Council," added: "I

[107] Morning Chronicle, 23 October 1828, 3, col. B.

[108] Conolly to the University Council, 4 December 1830, UCL.

[109] Ibid.

[110] He had previously been an unsuccessful candidate for the appointment as first superintendent at the new Hahwell Lunatic Asylum-ironically, a job Conolly was to seek and obtain some years later.

[111] Maudsley, "Memoir," 161.

[112] Bellot, University College London, 250–51.

have not troubled them with a useless detail of all my motives, but I am anxious that they should not think that I resigned from any want of interest in the university."^[113] The penultimate paragraph of the same letter suggests that the council's refusal to heed his pleas on Smith's behalf may have constituted the final straw. ("I am sorry to have to trouble the Council with a second communication on the same day, but Dr. Smith is so deeply concerned in my doing so that I hope it will be excused"); and there are hints that some of his colleagues may have been glad to see him go ("I cannot doubt that Dr. Thompson and Mr. Amos will approve of what I have done in this matter");^[114] but finally, Conolly is content to express no more than a veiled hope that his successor will have "a more favourable combination of circumstances than those in which I have endeavoured to perform [my duties]."^[115]

Characteristically, his valedictory address given at the end of the academic year offers little substance at great length. He acknowledges that others may be puzzled by his decision:

Retiring as I do, from a station, none of the prospective advantages of which have altogether escaped my attention—from a station which I was, four years ago, ambitious to obtain, and to which I felt it a great honour to be appointed—retiring, too, without the excuse of years, or any consciousness of a growing incapacity for exertion—I feel that a few words of explanation may be thought necessary, addressed to those who have interested themselves in my success.^[116]

Many words but no explanation then follow. He grants that "it will be believed that powerful motives must exist which induce me to resign all these expectations, and when every previous hope has been sacrificed, to retire from a scene of public activity in which I might at least have continued without discredit." He then adds, "I think I could show that circumstances exist—have for some time existed—which so limit my usefulness here as to make it no less my duty, than it is my inclination, to withdraw from this institution." But the nature of those "circumstances" he glides over in silence, not wishing "to carry with me any unpleasant recollections."^[117]

Whatever the precise reasons for his departure, the blow it constituted to his pride, to say nothing of his prospects, must have been staggering. Victorian medicine was marked by an enormous "division between the prestigious and influential men at the top of the profession

[113] Conolly to Horner, 4 December 1830, UCL.

[114] Ibid.

[115] Conolly to the University Council, 4 December 1830, UCL—his official resignation.

[116] John Conolly, "Valedictory Lecture on Retiring from London University," London Medical Gazette 8 (1831): 161–62.

[117] ibid., 161, 167.

and the ordinary practitioners [beneath]."^[118] Having once had hopes of belonging to the elite, Conolly now appeared to be thrust back, all but irretrievably, into the ranks of provincial obscurity. As one who later confessed "that he did not care for money, but that he very much liked the comfort and elegancies which money brings,"^[119] the prospect was scarcely inviting.

Placing his furniture in storage (where it was to remain for eighteen months until he could afford to rent a house large enough to contain it), he gathered his wife and four children (a third daughter, Anne Caroline, had been born in 1830) and removed once more to Stratford. But the attempt to pick up the threads of his old practice was a failure, and within a few weeks he felt compelled to uproot them all again, and move to the nearby town of Warwick.^[120] His one remaining tie to the metropolis was Thomas Coates, the secretary of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, now Horner's replacement at the university (though at a salary of 200 pounds rather than 1,200 pounds); and the correspondence between them gives us what little insight we have into Conolly's existence over the next seven years.

Conolly at first feigned optimism. While complaining that the demands of practice, being "unsettled as to house, and distracted at times with the noise of children," were interfering with his book on Ardent Spirits for the society, he boasted that "my practice [at Warwick] began at once, and the average thus far has equaled that of my best year before I left Warwickshire to be tormented 'for some sin' in the University." As for the future of "that Institution ..., much may be hoped from the timely (or untimely) death of some of the Council and Professors."^[121] Two weeks later, the attractions of the provincial backwater had begun to diminish. Conolly had begun a second book for the society, a popularization for the lower classes of medical ideas about cholera, only to discover that "this is a land when no books are to be borrowed or even stolen. The latest publication in the hands of any of my medical neighbours is a dissertation on the diseases which followed the Great Flood." Perforce he had to order three or four from London, "very unwillingly," because he could scarcely afford to purchase them. "Since these are for a piece on Cholera for the Society," he wondered whether "the publishers for the Society have the means of getting them more advantageously than I can do."^[122] In the future, he assured Coates, his financial position

[118] Peterson, Medical Profession, 25.

[119] Maudsley, "Memoir," 173. As Maudsley waspishly commented, this was "an amiable sentiment, which however, when closely analyzed, might be made to resolve itself into a liking for enjoyment without a liking for paying the painful cost of it."

[120] Conolly's residence here was on Theatre Street.

[121] Conolly to Thomas Coates, 13 October 1831, SDUK Coil., UCL.

[122] Ibid., 27 October 1831.

was bound to improve: "I really begin to think that at last I shall become a prosperous man, for I find myself getting Jewish." ^[123]

Such expectations were doomed to disappointment. In late December, he wrote an answer to Coates' "kind inquiry about my proceedings here. I think I am getting on so as to have a hope in time, of struggling through many difficulties."^[124] But the difficulties were formidable. He finished the manuscript on cholera just before Christmas 1831,^[125] but the small sum it earned him was swallowed up in the attempt to satisfy some of the creditors he had left behind in London: "After the 15th, Mr. Denies of 27 Princes Street Bank who is occasionally 'paying off' things for me will call to receive the fifty pounds—to save you any trouble." The companion volume on Ardent Spirits, first promised for December, then for January,^[126] remained unwritten, though Conolly in each letter promised its imminent dispatch.^[127] Meanwhile, he proposed that he write other titles for the society, only to have Coates decline them.^[128]

By May of 1832, the burden of his past failures and the struggle to scratch an inadequate living from his practice began to show in his letters:

I have been very busy lately, both in practice, and in lecturing to the Mechanics' Institution here, and in commemorating Shakespeare's birthday at Stratford. But I require constant task work to overcome a restlessness which what I suffered latterly in London has left in my brain and nervous system, which I sometimes fear will never leave me.^[129]

And his protestations that, except for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, "I hardly regret having lost anything else that London contains"^[130] sound increasingly hollow. After a long silence, he wrote plaintively to Coates, "Once upon a time there was a professor of my name, where is he now? May I flatter myself that you sometimes wonderingly ask that question?" If Coates were to visit him in Warwick, "you will find me a very rustic physician with some provincial fame, no doubt, but as my foolish friends say, buried." Revealingly, he continued, "I often wish I really were. . . . The London University has provided me for life with incurable care—but 'what's that'!—I have learned that resignation is the best philosophy."^[131]

The "incurable care" was not to be vanquished so easily, however. Less than two years later, Conolly wrote to Coates again, begging for a

[123] . Ibid.

[124] Ibid., 27 December 1831.

[125] Ibid., 18 December 1831.

[126] Ibid., 13 October 1831.

[127] See, for example, ibid., 14 February 1832; 2 February 1833 ("I venture to promise to finish forthwith my part of the Book of Gin"); 13 May 1834 (it would be done in three weeks if he could but get rid of his patients); 14 January 1836 (he finally abandoned the project later that year).

[128] Ibid., 17 January 1832.

[129] Ibid., 7 May 1832.

[130] Ibid.

[131] Ibid., 13 May 1834.

commission to write a series of popular treatises for working men on diseases of the chest, stomach, brain, and so on, to appear in the Working Man's Companion .

It is but candid to say that I am in some degree driven to the idea of this industry by necessity. . . . I have long been trying[?] to extricate myself from the ruin [sic ] which London brought me. . . . I am looking out for work. I am convinced I could prepare the little volumes of the Physician one every three months . Please think about it, and drop me a line soon—something I must set about and nothing takes my fancy more.^[132]

But nothing came of this proposal, and in 1838, still drowning in debt,^[133] Conolly embarked on a desperate attempt to escape from his provincial exile. "Not much encouraged thereto by his friends, who regarded such a step as the suicide of reputation and the confession of complete failure in life,"^[134] he applied for the vacant position of superintendent of the Middlesex County Lunatic Asylum, at Hanwell. At least this offered the security of a salary of 500 pounds per annum, together with free room and board for his family in the asylum; and he had, after all, a long-standing interest in the treatment of the insane, had written on insanity, and had served as inspector of the Warwickshire madhouses. To his dismay, however, his application was rejected, and in his stead the magistrates appointed J. R. Millingen, a retired army surgeon with no discernible background in the treatment of insanity.^[135]

Conolly's humiliation was now complete. "The outlook into the future as black as ever, family cares increasing," he once more uprooted his household and moved to Birmingham, to see whether, in a different setting, his luck would change.^[136] At forty-four, this latest failure appeared to have permanently dashed all the hopes he had once nurtured "of ob-

[132] Ibid., 14 January 1836.

[133] Hunter and Macalpine speculate that by this period, to make matters worse, his wife may have gone mad and required confinement in an asylum (Hunter and Macalpine, "Introduction," xxxiv). However, the evidence they present for this assertion is slender indeed.

[134] Maudsley, "Memoir," 167. Cf. Granville's later comment: "It is inconceivable that a man of position and culture would allow his family to have any connection with an asylum" (J. Mortimer Granville, The Care and Cure of the Insane, 2 vols. [London: Harwicke and Bogue, 1877], 1: 99).

[135] A year later, Conolly discovered that it was his progressive politics and association with efforts to educate the working classes that had cost him the job: "I lost my election to Hanwell last year solely by my exceedingly moderate Northhampton lecture; and I daresay nothing would give more annoyance to the Magistrates than my setting off to inflame county towns after the old fashion." Suitably chastened, he declined Coates' invitation to lecture for the SDUK at Lewes: "[Though I continue to believe] that those who endeavour, however humbly, to advance the intellectual condition of the people are their truest benefactors, I feel my exertions in that direction are closed" (Conolly to Coates, 26 August 1839, SDUK Coll., UCL).

[136] Maudsley, "Memoir," 167.

taining, through my exertions . . . , that reputation and those advantages of fortune, about which no reasonable man can, or ought to be indifferent."^[137] His fixed disposition to refuse "to recognize or accept the painful necessities of life" meant that throughout his life, "troubles, shirked at the time, were gathered up in the future, so as to demand at last some convulsive act of energy, in order to disperse them."^[138] But by this time, it must have seemed that even convulsive efforts would not suffice.

Ironically enough, Conolly was to be rescued from this depressing prospect by someone else's failures. The superintendency at Hanwell had originally fallen vacant when the Middlesex magistrates decided to experiment with a system of divided authority, allowing the superintendent to continue as the final arbiter of medical matters, but handing over administrative chores to a lay steward.^[139] The arrangement proved unworkable, and exacerbated by Millingen's inexperience and quarrelsome disposition, conditions in the asylum degenerated until they verged upon anarchy. Finally the magistrates were forced to intervene, dismissing the steward, Mr. Hunt, and accepting Millingen's resignation.^[140] This time Conolly's application was successful. Less than a year after his initial rejection, a few lines appeared in the Times announcing that "Dr. Conolly, late of [Warwick], is appointed to the very important office of Resident Physician at the Hanwell Lunatic Asylum, Middlesex."^[141]

Quite unexpectedly, the stern critic of asylum treatment, a man apparently incapable of managing his own affairs with even a modest degree of success, turned out to be an able and effective administrator of what was already the largest and—because of its metropolitan location—the most visible English asylum. Within a few weeks, the magistrates cheerfully announced that a remarkable change for the better had already taken place in the discipline and order of the establishment.^[142] Conolly had at last found something he could do well, and to his final days was to insist "that if his life were to come over again, he should like nothing better than to be at the head of a large public asylum, in order to superintend its administration."^[143] All the doubts he had once expressed about the appropriateness of the asylum solution, all questions about the deleterious effects of institutional existence, were at once suppressed in his enthusiasm for his new task.

Thomas Bakewell, not many years before, had commented that "the

[137] Conolly, "Valedictory Lecture,"161.

[138] Maudsley, "Memoir," 173.

[139] Hanwell County Lunatic Asylum Visitors' Reports, no. 45 (1838): 187–88. The existing superintendent, Sir William Ellis, resigned rather than submit to the change.

[140] Ibid., no. 49, 1839, 12–13.

[141] The Times, 15 May 1839, 3, col. F.

[142] Hanwell County Lunatic Asylum Visitors' Reports, no. 50 (1839): 26.

[143] Maudsley, "Memoir," 172.

regular [medical] practitioner has little advantage either of reputation or [of] profit to expect from the treatment of [insanity]."^[144] But whatever the general merits of this proposition, in Conolly's case it was emphatically disconfirmed. His achievements at Hanwell brought him, in rapid succession, national attention, royal notice and favor, election to a fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians, and ultimately recognition as "the most valuable consulting physician in mental disorders in Great Britain, and I suppose, in the world."^[145] In Maudsley's words, "On the crest of the wave which he raised and rode he was carried to great fame and moderate prosperity."^[146]

The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed a long struggle to "reform" the treatment of the mentally ill.^[147] Indeed, Hanwell, like all other "County Asylums," was one product of this movement. It was the proud boast of the reformers that the adoption of their program, based on the new system of moral treatment pioneered by the Tukes at the York Retreat, did away with the cruelties previously visited upon the insane, and replaced them with a regime based on kindness and forbearance. Whips and chains, those traditional accoutrements of the madhouse, were, like the straw and stench that were their inevitable accompaniment, to be banished from the modern asylum. The most sanguine hopes of the reformers had their limits, though. In Samuel Tuke's own words,

With regard to . . . the necessity of coercion, I have no hesitation in saying, that it will diminish or increase, as the moral treatment of the patient is more or less judicious. We cannot, however, anticipate that the most enlightened and ingenious humanity, will ever be able entirely to supercede the necessity of personal restraint.^[148]

Yet it was precisely this extraordinary feat that Conolly claimed to have accomplished. Beginning with his very first report of Hanwell, he boldly asserted "that the management of a large asylum is not only practicable without the application of bodily coercion to the patient, but that, after the total disuse of such a method of control, the whole character of

[144] Thomas Bakewell, The Domestic Guide in Cases of Insanity (Stafford: For the Author, 1805), ix. Bakewell was perhaps the best-known nonmedical asylum proprietor of the early nineteenth century.

[145] Edward Jarvis to Almira Jarvis, 31 May 1860; 5 June 1860, Jarvis Papers, Concord Free Public Library, Concord, Massachusetts. I am grateful to Gerald Grob for this reference.

[146] Maudsley, "Memoir," 169. A Southern Californian is irresistibly drawn to a picture of Conolly surfing his way to success.

[147] Cf. Scull, Museums of Madness; Jones, Lunacy, Law, and Conscience .

[148] Samuel Tuke, Description of the Retreat: An Institution near York for Insane Persons of the Society of Friends (1813), facsimile ed., ed. Richard A, Hunter and Ida Macalpine (London: Dawsons, 1964), 163.

the asylum undergoes a gradual and beneficial change."^[149] So far from being a regrettable necessity, or even a means of cure, restraint "was in fact creative of many of the outrages and disorders to repress which its application was commonly deemed indispensable;"^[150] and to that extent "restraints and neglect, may be considered as synonymous."^[151] In their place,

we rely wholly upon constant superintendence, constant kindness, and firmness when required. . . . Insanity, thus treated, undergoes great, if not unexpected modifications; and the wards of lunatic asylums no longer illustrate the harrowing description of their former state. Mania, not exasperated by severity, and melancholia, not deepened by the want of all ordinary consolations, lose the exaggerated character in which they were formerly beheld.^[152]

These were large and astonishing claims, and they were greeted in many quarters with skepticism, if not outright hostility. They were, sniffed "Medicus" in the correspondence columns of the Times, "a piece of contemptible quackery and a mere bait for the public ear."^[153] Millingen seized the opportunity to denounce his successor: "Nothing can be more absurd, speculative, or peculative than the attempts of theoretic visionaries, or candidates for popular praise, to do away with all restraint. Desirable as such a management might be, it can never prevail without much danger to personal security, and a useless waste and dilapidation of property."^[154] Others went further still and reiterated the traditional medical claim that restraint was a form of therapy. Dr. Samuel Hadwin, former house surgeon at the Lincoln Lunatic Asylum, wrote:

Restraint forms the very basis and principle on which the sound treatment of lunatics is founded. The judicious and appropriate adaptation of the various modifications of this powerful means to the peculiarities of each case of insanity, comprises a large portion of the curative regimen of the scientific and rational practitioner; in his hands is a remedial agent of the first importance, and it appears to me that it is about as likely to be dispensed with, in the cure of mental diseases, as that the various articles of the materia medica will altogether be dispensed with in the cure of the bodily.^[155]

[149] Conolly, quoted in Maudsley, "Memoir," 169.

[150] Conolly, quoted in Granville, Care and Cure, 1:111.

[151] Conolly, Treatment of the Insane, 323.

[152] Conolly, quoted in Sir James Clark's A Memoir of John Conolly, M.D., D.C.L. (London: Murray, 1869), 22, 28.

[153] The Times, 10 December 1840, 6, col. A; see also ibid., 5 January 1841, 7, col. B.

[154] J. G. Millingen, Aphorisms on the Treatment and Management of the Insane (London: Churchill, 1840), 106.

[155] The Times, 5 January 1841, 7, col. B. This was perhaps an unfortunate comparison, given the subsequent fate of the bulk of the nineteenth-century pharmacopoeia. For earlier versions of Hadwen's position, see William Cullen, First Lines of the Practice of Physic (Edinburgh: Bell and Bradfute, 1784), 4: 151–55; John Haslam, Observations on Madness and Melancholy, 2d ed. (London: Callow, 1809), 280–91; and George Man Burrows, Commentaries on the Causes, Forms, Symptoms and Treatment of Insanity (London: Underwood, 1898), 686. Alexander Morison sought to rally opposition to nonrestraint in the early 1840s by forming the Society for the Improvement of the Condition of the Insane.

But while many medical men viewed nonrestraint with extreme suspicion, the new system quickly attracted powerful support in other quarters. During the first month of 1840, the correspondence columns of the Lancet were opened impartially to both proponents and opponents of the new system, in an effort "to contribute, in any way, to the solution of a question of so much importance."^[156] However, the strain of such uncharacteristic even-handedness eventually told on its editor, Thomas Wakley. Never one to abide by his own admonition to the disputants that "angry recrimination can do no good, and may do much evil,"^[157] he soon switched to a fervent advocacy of the cause of reform, couched in his inimitable mixture of panegyric and vituperation.^[158] More respectable opinion also rallied to Conolly's support. The venerable Samuel Tuke visited and bestowed his benediction ("Who can visit or contemplate the establishment of Hanwell, containing 800 insane persons, governed without any personal restraint, without gratitude or surprise?").^[159] Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, by now leader of the parliamentary forces seeking "lunacy reform," saw nonrestraint as the vindication and epitome of reform: He "could not speak too highly either of the system itself, or of the manner in which it was carried out by the talented Superintendent, Dr. Conolly."^[160] Meanwhile, the Illustrated London News brought Conolly's achievements to the notice of a still wider audience, extolling still another British contribution to the triumph of humanity.^[161]

Perhaps the most important force in transforming Conolly into a national celebrity was, however, the Times . Beginning in late 1840, it devoted close and sympathetic attention to the progress of his experiment

[156] "Editorial," The Lancet, 4 April 1840, 58. There were some fifty contributions of one sort or another to this debate during the first six months of 1840.

[157] Ibid.

[158] See The Lancet, 22 November 1842, 326. See also Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, 3d series, vol. 76, 23 July 1844, cols. 1275–81. Compare Wakley's characteristic description of the elites who controlled the Royal Colleges of Physicians and of Surgery as "crafty, intriguing, corrupt, avaricious, cowardly, plundering, rapacious, soul-betraying, dirtyminded BATS" (The Lancet 1 October 1831, 2). On Wakley and his "crusades," see S.S. Sprigge, The Life and Times of Thomas Wakley (London: Longman, Green, 1899); and Charles W. Brook, Battling Surgeon (Glasgow: Strickland, 1945).

[159] Samuel Tuke, "Introduction" to Jacobi, Construction and Management of Hospitals, xxxv.

[160] Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, 3d ser., vol. 65 (16 July 1842), col. 223.

[161] Illustrated London News, 21 May 1843; see also 15 January 1848.

for a period of some four years.^[162] Commenting on the "very considerable opposition . . . the attempt to obtain so desirable an object" had stirred up, it noted that such resistance had also surfaced within the institution, "not simply on the part of several of the county magistrates, but even from many of the servants and officers of the asylum." Fortunately, "that humane gentleman," Dr. Conolly, had, with the staunch support of another faction among the magistrates, vanquished the peculiar notion that there was "more actual cruelty hidden under the show of humanity in the system of non-coercion than was openly displayed in muffs, strait-waistcoats, leg-locks, and coercion chairs," and had successfully brought to fruition "one of the greatest works that the dictates of the humane mind could suggest."^[163] Three weeks later, a report on the celebration of "Old Year's Night" at Hanwell demonstrated for the paper's readers the happy effects of the salutary system of nonrestraint. The furies of madness were thoroughly domesticated, and "the utmost tranquility prevailed." Indeed, when the 400 patients assembled for the commencement of the merriment, "scarcely a word was to be heard and the effect produced was most striking and pleasing."^[164] Soon afterwards, nonrestraint received the royal imprimatur: The Duke of Cambridge arrived and spent two and a half hours at "this admirable institution," lunched with Conolly (presumably not on ordinary asylum fare), and left proclaiming himself "highly delighted" with all he had seen.^[165]

Basking in this unexpected praise of and attention to one of their pauper institutions, the Middlesex magistrates at once issued Conolly's first four annual reports bound together in a single new edition. Professional recognition of his achievement also grew apace. At the third annual meeting of the new Association of Medical Officers of Asylums and Hospitals for the Insane, Conolly was asked to take the chair.^[166] In 1844,

[162] See, for example, The Times, 18 November 1840, 6, col. E; 10 December 1840, 6, col. E; 30 December 18400, 3, col. B; 8 December 1841, 3, col. A; 14 December 1841, 3, col. D; 5 January 1842, 5, col. F.

[163] Ibid., 8 December 184l, 3, col. A; 14 December 1841, 3, col. D.

[164] Ibid., 5 January 1842, 5, col. F. The praise may strike modern readers as misplaced, even itself bizarre, but the Victorians exhibited an unalloyed delight in the reduction of the vicious, the depraved, and the unruly to at least a simulacrum of order and decorum. Such practical demonstrations of the power of "reason and morality" evidently possessed great symbolic power, and those who successfully staged them could count on widespread approval and acclaim. I shall discuss the sources of this praise in a moment. On the changing meaning (and methods) of domesticating the mad, from the early eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, see Chapter 3.

[165] The Times, 8 March 1842, 13, col. E.

[166] The association was founded in 1841, mainly through the efforts of Dr. Samuel Hitch of the Gloucester Asylum. Intended to draw together the nascent specialty and to protect the professional interests of its members, it drew its membership from the chief medical officers of both public and private asylums. In 1865, it was renamed the MedicoPsychological Association, and it is now the Royal College of Psychiatry.

he was elected a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians.^[167] The 1844 Report of the Metropolitan Commissioners in Lunacy, it is true, exhibited rather more ambivalence about the value of nonrestraint,^[168] but two years later, the new national Lunacy Commission had thrown aside such doubts, and nonrestraint became the ruling orthodoxy of British asylumdom.

Conolly had thus become, in the eyes of his admirers, "one of the most distinguished men of the age, and one whose name will pass down to posterity with those of the Howards, the Clarksons, the Father Mathews, and other great redressers of the wrongs, crimes, and miseries of mankind."^[169] Oxford University awarded him an honorary D.C.L.; and his marble bust was executed by Benzoni.^[170] In 1850, the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association feted Conolly at their annual meeting at Hull.^[171] And two years later, with Lord Shaftesbury presiding,^[172] Conolly's achievements were again celebrated, and he was presented with a gift of a three-quarter-length portrait by Sir John Watson Gordon, R.A., and an allegorical piece of silver plate standing two feet high and valued at 500 pounds, which illustrated mental patients with and without restraint, all surmounted by the god of healing.^[173]

Such extraordinary praise and recognition suggest that Conolly's achievement had a symbolic significance for the Victorian bourgeoisie that extended far beyond its contribution to the welfare of the mad. Confronted by the threats of Chartism and a militant working class; surrounded by the all-but-inescapable evidence of the devastating impact of industrial capitalism on the social and physical landscape; and themselves the authors of a New Poor Law assailed by its critics (most memorably in Dickens' Oliver Twist ) as the very embodiment of inhumanity and meanness of spirit, the Victorian governing classes could at least find a source of pride in the generous and kindly treatment now accorded to the mad. In a wholly practical way, the work of the lunacy reformers constituted a proof of their society's progressive and humane character. (Hence the curious claim made by Sir George Paget, that the

[167] See Munk's Roll, 4:33.

[168] "Report of the Metropolitan Commissioners in Lunacy, 1844," Sessional Papers of the House of Lords, vol. 26 (1844).

[169] Morning Chronicle, 5 October 1843.

[170] Leigh, British Psychiatry, 227.

[171] See The Lancet, to August 1850, 181–82; 17 August 1850, 224.

[172] Ashley, who had now succeeded to his father's title, remained one of Conolly's staunchest admirers, referring to his achievement before the 1859 Select Committee of the House of Commons as "the greatest triumph of skill and humanity the world ever knew" (House of Commons, Select Committee on the Care and Treatment of Lunatics, 1859–1860, 45–49).

[173] The Lancet, 3 April 1852, p. 339; Clark, Memoir, 44–51.

Victorian asylum was "the most blessed manifestation of true civilization the world can present.")^[174]

As the man who epitomized and had brought the new approach to perfection, John Conolly had thus richly earned his audience's applause. The paternal order he had established demonstrated that even the irrational and raving could be reduced to docility, and by moral suasion and self-sacrifice rather than force. Here, as he put it in the concluding lines of his panegyric on the new asylum,

calmness will come; hope will revive; satisfaction will prevail. Some unmanageable tempers, some violent or sullen patients, there must always be; but much of the violence, much of the ill-humour, almost all the disposition to meditate mischievous or fatal revenge, or self-destruction will disappear. . . . Cleanliness and decency will be maintained or restored; and despair itself will sometimes be found to give place to cheerfulness or secure tranquility. [The asylum is the place] where humanity, if anywhere on earth, shall reign supreme.^[175]

A Potemkin village characterized by an absence of conflict and strife, it constituted a veritable utopia wherein the lower orders of society could coexist in harmony and tranquility with their betters (personified by the figure of a superintendent devoted to their welfare and content to "sacrifice . . . the ordinary comforts and conventionalities of life" for their sake.^[176]

In celebrating Conolly's accomplishment, Victorians were thus simultaneously affirming the moral validity of their social order itself; and his powerful friends, while acknowledging that he "no doubt received important assistance from fellow-labourers in the same field," now closed ranks around the proposition that "Dr. Conolly himself put an end to the use of all forms of mechanical restraint in our asylums."^[177]

But such claims were, as Conolly himself periodically acknowledged,^[178] at best a serious distortion. Nonrestraint was introduced, not by him, but by Robert Gardiner Hill, then a twenty-four-year-old house surgeon at

[174] George E. Paget, The Harveian Oration (Cambridge: Deighton, Bell, 1866), 34–35.

[175] John Conolly, On the Construction and Government of Lunatic Asylums (London: Churchill, 1847), 143.

[176] Ibid. For another contemporary version of this vision, see W. A. F. Browne, What Asylums Were, Are, and Ought to Be (Edinburgh: Black, 1837), esp. 229–31. David Rothman has likewise argued that American alienists and others saw the asylum as a model for the proper functioning of the larger society, though he fails to make explicit the ideological resonance of these claims. See David Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971).

[177] Clark, Memoir, vii–viii.

[178] For example, Hanwell Lunatic Asylum, Annual Report (1840), 52; Conolly, Treatment of the Insane, 177–78; idem, "President's Address," Journal of Mental Science 5 (1859), 74; Clark, Memoir, 49.

the provincial subscription asylum at Lincoln. Hill had announced the system in a public lecture to the Lincoln Mechanics Institute in 1838: "I wish to complete that which Pinel began. I assert then in plain and distinct terms, that in a properly constructed building, with a sufficient number of suitable attendants, restraint is never necessary, never justifiable, and always injurious, in all cases of lunacy whatever."^[179] For almost two years before Conolly assumed his duties at Hanwell, Hill had demonstrated in practice the feasibility of such an approach. And it was, in fact, a visit to Lincoln that prompted Conolly to try the new system.^[180]

Yet Hill's obvious claims as the originator of nonrestraint brought him little honor and scant reward of any other sort. Though bearing the brunt of the early assaults on the system as speculative and wildly misguided,^[181] he was granted none of the subsequent recognition and social lionization so readily accorded to Conolly. On the contrary, machinations among the staff and governors at the Lincoln Asylum forced his resignation there,^[182] and he found himself unable to obtain another asylum post. Ironically,—and this failure must have been especially galling—he was even rejected when he sought the position of medical officer under Conolly at Hanwell,^[183] and so was forced by default to enter general practice.^[184] Though a decade later he became the proprietor of a private licensed house, he never managed to obtain an appointment at another public asylum.

One can readily imagine the effects of this on someone as sensitive to questioning of his own merits as Hill was. Apparently the last straw was

[179] Hill, Management of Lunatic Asylums, 147.

[180] He arrived in May 1839, with his brother William, proprietor of a licensed asylum at Cheltenham, and noted in the Visitors' Book, "Having read Mr. Hill's lecture . . . we visited this asylum with feelings of unusual curiosity and interest; we have been deeply impressed" (quoted in Hunter and Macalpine, "Introduction" to Conolly, Treatment of the Insane, x).

[181] See, for example, The Lancet, 28 November 1840, 337–41; 9 January 1841, 532–40; 30 January 1841, 659; 15 January 1842, 544–46.

[182] Robert Gardiner Hill, A Concise History of the Entire Abolition of Mechanical Restraint in the Treatment of the Insane (London: Longman, 1857), 13–14.

[183] Alexander Walk, "Lincoln and Non-restraint," British Journal of Psychiatry 117 (1970), 481.

[184] I have suggested elsewhere (see Chapter 6) that the professional ostracism and abuse may in part have derived from Hill's heretical insistence that "in the treatment of the insane, medicine is of little avail. . . . Moral treatment with a view to induce habits of self-control, is all and everything " (Hill, Management of Lunatic Asylums, 45 [emphasis in the original]; also quoted in The Lancet, 6 July 1839, 554, and in Hill, Entire Abolition, 72). Walk, by contrast, blames Hill's acerbic temperament and unimpressive personality (Walk, "Lincoln and Nonrestraint," 488). Certainly, one must concede that Conolly's gentlemanly attributes and demeanor, to say nothing of his powerful friends, must have made him a far more suitable candidate for canonization than his unpolished, ill-educated, and obscure provincial rival. A more extended discussion of this issue appears later.

when, in his presence, he heard Conolly praised as the author of his system at the 1850 meeting of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association. Though Conolly graciously indicated that the merit was not his alone, but was shared with Dr. Charlesworth (the visiting physician at Lincoln), and though Charlesworth then indicated that "the real honour belonged to Mr. Hill,"^[185] he was not satisfied, not least, perhaps, because it was forcibly brought home to him how soon his claim to priority had been forgotten.^[186]

Hill promptly sought to reassert his claims by writing to the medical press, only to be met by an attempt by his former enemies at Lincoln to claim the merit for Charlesworth.^[187] And when Hill's supporters took up a collection for a testimonial to rival Conolly's, his opponents promptly erected a statue of Charlesworth, with a plaque on the base describing him as the originator of nonrestraint, on the Lincoln Asylum grounds.^[188] More seriously, Hill fell afoul of Thomas Wakley's pen, and found himself traduced in the Lancet 's columns in the latter's typically unscrupulous fashion.^[189]

Conolly's role in all of this was hardly innocent. With whatever motives, he consistently declined to give Hill his due. That he had borrowed

[185] The Lancet, 24 August 1850, 247–48.

[186] Ibid. For example, Dr. Archibald Robertson, vice president of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association and physician to the Northampton Infirmary, wrote of Charlesworth's concession:

The information made the greater impression on me, as it was perfectly new to me; so vague and imperfect was my knowledge as to the first discovery and practice of the "non-restraint system" prior to the Hull meeting, that I had thought the merit of it belonged to Dr. Conolly of Hanwell. Acting on this thought, I had . . . contributed my mite towards a testimonial to Dr. Conolly; which had been suggested at a meeting in London resided over by Lord Ashley (quoted in Hill, Entire Abolition, 225).

[187] Charlesworth, who had been the most active of the three visiting physicians at Lincoln (see Walk, "Lincoln and Non-restraint"), hut who had nevertheless freely acknowledged till now that the credit for the discovery belonged to Hill alone, henceforth maintained a studied silence on the issue.

[188] Charlesworth had died before this occurred.

[189] Cf. Brook, Battling Surgeon, 149. Hill's claims were dismissed as "the audacious assaults of envy," and his sanity was subsequently called into question (The Lancet, 10 October 1857, 365). Wakley's venom may in part have reflected his friendship with Conolly. It certainly also derived from the tact that Hill had the misfortune to have his cause adopted by the rival Medical Circular, a journal that attacked Wakley as a liar given to "senile ranting," "as insensible to evidence as he is to shame," a "licensed reviler" who was "an offense to professional nostrils" (Medical Circular, 11 August 1852, 304). Wakley was only too ready to respond in kind. On Wakley's generally strained relations with the rest of the medical press, see Sprigge, Thomas Wakle, 156–66. Cf., for example, his comment on the first issue of the Medical Times and Gazette: "The Medical Gazette, whose special mission it was to crush ourselves, died of dullness and debility; the Medical Times of stupidity and infamy. A hybrid spectral illusion, commemorating the joint names of these two departed journals, and putting on, as its only hope, our outward form and semblance, is all that remains" (The Lancet 4 March 1854, 286).

the idea of nonrestraint from Lincoln he could not deny; that the discovery was Hill's he sought constantly to obscure.^[190] And when Hill in exasperation at length lashed out at his now deceased rival,^[191] he succeeded only in alienating his audience and in further tarnishing his own reputation. His shrill and strident claims of priority, his wearisome marshaling of minutiae to prove his own originality,^[192] were "not only boring, but repellent."^[193] As he proved chronically unable to grasp, one who exhibited such boorish and ungentlemanly qualities could never hope to be accorded a place of honor in a profession desperate to dissociate itself from all that smacked of lower-class, tradesmanlike behavior.

The elegant and socially graceful Conolly inflicted no such handicaps on himself, displaying "a certain humility of manner, a degree of self-deprecation . . . which failed not to attract men; it was nonetheless captivating because it might seem the form in which a considerable dash of self-consciousness declared itself."^[194] On the public stage that he had secured for himself at Hanwell, he took delight in the opportunity to display the liberal and paternalist instincts of the gentleman:

His interest in the patients never seemed to flag. Even cases beyond all hope of recovery were still objects of his attention. He was always pleased to see them happy, and had a kind word for each. Simple things which vainer men with less wisdom would have disregarded or looked upon as too insignificant for their notice, arrested Dr. Conolly's attention, and supplied matter for remark and commendation—e.g., a face cleaner than usual, hair more carefully arranged, a neater cap, a new riband, clothes put on with greater neatness, and numerous little things of a like kind, enabled him to address his poor illiterate patients in gentle and loving accents, and thus woke up their feeble minds, caused sad faces to gleam with

[190] Conolly's friends continued the process even after his death. See, for example, Clark, Memoir, 39. Andrew Wynter, otherwise as given to eulogizing Conolly as were most Victorians, was sharply critical of his behavior on this point: Conolly's attempt to give a share of the credit to Charlesworth "must be ascribed to a too partial friendship. Dr. Gardiner Hill is certainly not persuasive in his style, and for that reason has raised up many enemies to his assertions." But Wynter felt that Hill's rightful claims should not thereby be rejected. Modern observers have not always been so kind about Conolly's motives. Frank, for example, while acknowledging that Conolly and Charlesworth were "very friendly," places more emphasis on the fact that "Hill discredited entirely Conolly's role as a pioneer, at the same time reminding one and all that Conolly was older than he and was never influential until after Hill had made his notable Mechanics Institute speech" (Justin A. Frank, "Non-restraint and Robert Gardiner Hill," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 41 [1967]: 157).

[191] Robert Gardiner Hill, Lunacy: Its Past and Present (London: Longman, Green, 1870), 53.

[192] Ibid.; idem, Entire Abolition .

[193] Walk, "Lincoln and Non-restraint," 494.

[194] Maudsley, "Memoir," 174. Conolly, said the American alienist Edward Jarvis, was "one of the most polished gentlemen I have met in England" (Edward Jarvis to Almira Jarvis, 8 July 1860, Jarvis Papers, Concord Free Public Library, Concord, Massachusetts).

a smile, even though transient, and made his visits to the wards to be longed for and appreciated. Dr. Conolly rejoiced in acts of beneficence. To be poor and to be insane were conditions which at once endeared the sufferers to him; and when the insanity was removed, and when the patient left the asylum, he generally strove to obtain some pecuniary aid for her from the 'Adelaide Fund' (a fund originated for the relief of discharged patients), and supplemented this very often indeed with liberal donations from his own purse.^[195]

Despite a patient population nearing a thousand, a "monstrous multitude of diseased humanity"^[196] crammed into buildings originally designed for half that number, and notwithstanding a dismally low cure rate, Conolly's Hanwell was widely regarded as a splendid advertisement for the merits of reform and nonrestraint.^[197] From time to time, he protested mildly that the asylum was too big^[198] and objected to the Middle-sex magistrate's propensity to seek cheeseparing economies. But for the most part, he sought to exploit Hanwell's fame to persuade others of the advantages, indeed the necessity, of expanding the numbers of county asylums. Such endeavors acquired a new urgency in the wake of the passage of the 1845 Lunatic Asylums Act, for although public provision for the pauper insane was now made compulsory, magistrates in many parts of the country sought to delay or evade building asylums of their own. Accordingly, Conolly wrote a series of articles for the Lancet (republished the following year as a monograph)^[199] extolling the humanity and economy of asylums devoted to the cure of the lunatic and urging their rapid construction. Ironically enough, his own role at Hanwell was by this time much diminished and soon to end. His disengagement was not provoked by any disenchantment with administering an everlarger warehouse for the unwanted; or did it constitute a protest at the deficiencies of an overcrowded establishment later described as "a vast and straggling building, in which the characteristics of a prison, a selfadvertising charitable institution, and some ambitious piece of Poor Law architecture struggle for prominence."^[200] Instead, it derived from administrative changes that threatened his own authority and status.

[195] John Hitchman, quoted in Clark, Memoir, 40–43. Hitchman, later superintendent of the Derby County Asylum, had begun his career under Conolly at Hanwell. See also [Andrew Wynter], "Non-restraint in the Treatment of the Insane," Edinburgh Review 131 (1870): 83.

[196] Edward Jarvis to Almira Jarvis, 22 June 1860, Jarvis Papers, Concord Free Public Library, Concord, Massachusetts.

[197] In 1842, he even managed to gain permission to introduce in the asylum the clinical teaching of medical students that he had originally proposed while at the University of London.

[198] Conolly, Construction and Government, 10.

[199] See ibid.

[200] Granville, Care and Cure, 1:154. See also Edward Jarvis to Almira Jarvis, 31 May 1860, Concord Free Public Library, Concord, Massachusetts. Only in his declining years did Conolly vigorously protest the tendency of county asylums to be little more than "museums for the collection of insanity" (Francis Scott, "English County Asylums," Fortnightly Review 26 [1879]: 114–43). See Conolly, "President's Address," esp. 75; and idem, A Letter to Benjamin Rotch, Esquire, Chairman of the Committee of Visitors, on the Plan and Government of the Additional Lunatic Asylum . . . About to Be Erected at Colney Hatch (London: Churchill, 1847), 18.

The Middlesex magistrates had long exhibited a much greater disposition to interfere in the daily running of "their" asylum then was to be found elsewhere. Their evident belief that nonmedical administration could affect significant economies had already led them to a proposed reorganization of Hanwell that had provoked their first superintendent, Sir William Ellis, to resign. And they were apparently not dissuaded by the fact that their subsequent experiment with a system of divided authority had dismally failed, forcing the resignation of the physician and the dismissal of the steward, and thus indirectly bringing about Conolly's appointment. For when the metropolitan commissioners in lunacy insisted that Hanwell's "extreme magnitude" required more extensive supervision, the justices once more developed a scheme to place daily administration in lay hands. Conolly did not wait for the plan's implementation—in later years, he spoke of "the absurdity—I could almost say the criminality,—of committing one of the most serious of human maladies to the charge of anyone uninstructed in medicine"^[201] —but promptly offered his resignation.^[202]

This time, as had not been the case with Ellis, a compromise was arranged. Anxious to retain the connection with Conolly that had brought them so much favorable publicity, the magistrates offered him the post of "visiting and consulting physician" at a reduced salary of 350 pounds, and he accepted. His duties now became "to give his attendance for two days a week, and for six hours at every attendance." At other times, medical matters were to be dealt with by the house surgeons who had formerly acted as his assistants.^[203] Convinced that it was imperative to have a single resident officer exercising ultimate control over the asylum and its staff, and equally certain that medical men were fit neither by temperament nor by training to assume such a role, the magistrates announced the appointment of John Godwin, a retired army officer, to fill the position.^[204]

[201] Conolly, Letter to Benjamin Rotch, 18.

[202] Shaftesbury, who had a lifelong skepticism about some aspects of the medical profession's involvement in the treatment of insanity, secretly supported the Middlesex magistrates' plan. See "Diaries of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury," 15 November 1844, National Register of Archives.

[203] Hanwell Lunatic Asylum, Sixty-ninth Visitors' Report, 16 January 1844, 4.

[204] Hanwell Lunatic Asylum, Seventieth Report, 3–7. The appointment of a lay "governor" and the choice of Godwin for the position were both secretly endorsed by Shaftesbury. See his "Diaries," 15 November 1844.

Under the terms of the appointment, it was specified that "the Governor has the power of suspending not only the servants but even the Medical Officers and Matron of the Asylum. He has, also, the entire control over the classification, employment, amusements, instruction, and general management of the patients . . . subject only to the general control of the Visiting Justices."^[205] His superiority was reflected in the higher salary paid him: while the two resident medical officers received 200 pounds each, the governor was paid 350 pounds a year. In view of the range and scope of affairs in which his lay judgment was supposedly given precedence, there was a disingenuousness about the claim that "in regulating his particular duties . . . the Visiting Justices have endeavoured to reconcile his position as their officer whom they will vest with paramount authority to enforce all their orders and regulations, with the distinct responsibility of the Medical Officers in all that concern the moral management as well as the strictly medical treatment of the Patients."^[206] For, in practice, to concede the doctors' right to direct the moral treatment of the patients would involve taking away from the governor the very areas of supervision where his authority was supposed to be paramount; while to refuse to concede it was to reduce the asylum physicians to mere decorative appendages. Conflict was thus unavoidable, though the ensuing struggle reached a swift conclusion.

In August of 1844, just four months after his initial appointment, the justices cryptically announced, in two lines buried at the end of their report, that Godwin's resignation had been tendered and accepted.^[207] In their next report, they indicated that "after the retirement of the late Governor, the Visiting Justices resolved to defer filling up the vacancy for awhile, and to entrust the management of the Asylum to the ability and experience of the principal [i.e., medical] officers until they could determine what course for its future government it would be most advisable to adopt."^[208] Already, however, they were noting "the progressive improvement in the order and discipline of the Establishment" since Godwin's departure.^[209] Six months later, they conceded that under medical supervision, "good management and order prevail [and] that they have every reason to be satisfied with the way in which the Asylum continues to be conducted."^[210]

The idea of employing a lay administrator to direct the asylum's affairs was now quietly buried; but the attempt to implement it had already served to all but sever Conolly's connection with Hanwell, after

[205] Metropolitan Commissioners in Lunacy Report, 1844, 28 (emphasis added).

[206] Hanwell County Asylum, Sixty-ninth Visitors' Report, 1844, 5.

[207] Hanwell County Asylum, Seventy-second Report, 1844, 13.

[208] Hanwell County Asylum, Seventy-third Visitors' Report, 1845, 1.

[209] Ibid.

[210] Hanwell County Asylum, Seventy-fifth Report, 1845, 3.

less than four years on the job. "Mutual trust between himself and the Justices was lost. He felt that they preferred the opinion of others and that his authority and system were eroded."^[211] He hung on to his visiting appointment until 1852, when he finally resigned, to the relief of the magistrates, to whom his departure now meant little more than saving the ratepayers some money.

Even before this final rupture, Conolly's situation was such that be was forced to seek some alternative means of earning his livelihood. At 500 pounds per annum, his salary as resident officer at Hanwell had scarcely been munificent, but at least he was also provided with room and board, a not inconsiderable benefit. His visiting appointment, however, entailed not just a reduced salary, but also the loss of this hidden subsidy. His new-found eminence ought presumably to have allowed him to escape the penury he had endured until middle age. But the difficulty was to know how to earn a living, given that there were no defined alternative careers for alienists, outside the burgeoning asylum system.

Almost fifty, Conolly had never possessed the qualities to succeed in single-handedly defining and developing a new form of specialist practice. Not until much later in the century, with the careers of men like his son-in-law, Henry Maudsley,^[212] or Sir George Savage,^[213] did the alternative of a practice based almost exclusively on the consulting room become possible. Conolly's fame did lead to his being called in as a consultant in difficult cases,^[214] and he was also a frequently called expert witness in criminal cases where the insanity defense was raised.^[215] But as in his ear-

[211] Hunter and Macalpine, "Introduction," xxxii.

[212] Henry Maudsley ( 1835– 1918), editor of the Journal of Mental Science (1862–78) and professor of medical jurisprudence at University College London, was the leading alienist of his generation. On his life, see Aubrey Lewis, "Henry Mandsley: His Works and Influence," Journal of Mental Science 97 (1951); 259–77; and Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady (New York: Pantheon, 1985), chap. 4.

[213] Sir George Savage (1842–1921), formerly physician superintendent of the Royal Bethlem Hospital, editor of the Journal of Mental Science, and president of the Medico-Psychological Association and the Neurological Association, was one of the most fashionable consultants on mental diseases in late-nineteenth-century London. For Savage's role in treating Virginia Woolf, see Stephen Trombley, "All That Summer She Was Mad": Virginia Woolf and Her Doctors (London: J unction Books, 198l).

[214] For example, when the confinement of Lady Rosina Bulwer Lytton in a private asylum threatened to become a scandal of major proportions, her husband sought advice from "the most experienced and able physicians" specializing in psychological medicine, choosing Conolly and Forbes Winslow. By a curious coincidence, Lady Lytton, whose sanity they confirmed, was an inmate in Robert Gardiner Hill's asylum, Wyke House (The Times, 19 July, 1858, 12, col. E.). Conolly also testified at such well-publicized commissions in lunacy as those involving the cases of W. F. Windham, Sir Henry Meux, and Mrs. Catherine Cummings.

[215] For example, Robert Tare, Edward Oxford, and Luigi Buranelli. On this aspect of Victorian psychiatric practice, see Roger Smith, Trial by Medicine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981).

lier efforts at private practice, he scarcely distinguished himself in these spheres. His forensic testimony in the Pate case, for example, prompted the Morning Chronicle to complain that "Dr. Conolly appears to have devoted his attention so exclusively to . . . mental disease that . . . he can apparently no longer distinguish where absolute madness begins and moral and legal responsibility ceases. There are very few of our fellow subjects, we suspect, who could get from Dr. Conolly a certificate of perfect sanity."^[216]

Both lunacy inquisitions and criminal trials in which the insanity defense was invoked were highly charged occasions. While the latter were widely seen as a ruse to escape just punishment, a threat to the concept of responsibility and, thus, to the very foundation of criminal justice,^[217] the former raised the specter of wrongful confinement of the sane in asylums, "a living death" that inspired periodic moral panics throughout the nineteenth century.^[218] Large segments of the Victorian public seem to have questioned both the motives and the competence of alienists who claimed expertise in assessing madness, and Conolly's published opinions and his actions both helped feed these suspicions. Before entering upon a career as an asylum doctor, he had insisted that not every case of unsound mind required incarceration in an asylum. Rather, there was a need for a careful assessment of each case to determine "whether or not the departure from sound mind be of a nature to justify the confinement of the individual, "^[219] and such inquiries were likely to disclose that "complete restraint is very rarely required."^[220] A less discriminating approach posed a serious threat to individual freedom and peace of mind.^[221]

Two decades later, these were almost precisely the fears his clear repudiation of his earlier views seemed calculated to arouse. In 1849, in the case of Nottidge v. Ripley, the lord chief baron of the Court of the Exchequer, Sir Frederick Pollock, declared that in his opinion, "no lunatic should be confined in an asylum unless dangerous to himself or oth-

[216] The Morning Post, quoted in Hunter and Macalpine, "Introduction," xxxvii. Robert Pate, a former cavalry officer, had struck Queen Victoria on the head with his walking stick. His defense, for which Conolly appeared as an expert witness, was that his conduct stemmed from an irresistible impulse, itself caused by underlying mental derangement. This explanation provoked a memorable response from the judge, Mr. Baron Alderson: "A man might say that he picked a pocket from some uncontrollable impulse, and in that case the law would trove an uncontrollable impulse to punish him for it " (reported in the Medical Times 1 [1850], 66 [emphasis in the original]).

[217] Cf. Smith, Trial by Medicine .

[218] Peter McCandless, "Liberty and Lunacy: The Victorians and Wrongful Confinement," in Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen: The Social History of Psychiatry in the Victorian Era, ed. Andrew Scull (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press; London: Athlone Press, 1981), 339–62.

[219] Conolly, Inquiry, 35 (emphasis in the original).

[220] Ibid., 386.

[221] Ibid., 8–9.

ers."^[222] Notwithstanding the fact that Conolly's own earlier opinions were the expressed authority for this decision,^[223] he at once issued a lengthy remonstrance declaring Pollock's dictum "both mistaken and mischievous."^[224] It transpired that he now believed that an extraordinary range of behaviors qualified one for the madhouse: "excessive eccentricity," "utter disregard of cleanliness and decency," "perversions of the moral feelings and passions," a disposition "to give away sums of money which they cannot afford to lose," indeed all cases where people's "being at large is inconsistent with the comfort of society and their own welfare."^[225] Particularly in the young, incipient madness took on protean forms, and its cure required active and early intervention. Suitable cases for treatment included

young men, whose grossness of habits, immoderate love of drink, disregard of honesty, or general irregularity of conduct, bring disgrace and wretchedness on their relatives; and whose unsound state of mind, unless met by prompt and proper treatment, precedes the utter subversion of reason;—young women of ungovernable temper, subject, in fact, to paroxysms of real insanity; and at other times sullen, wayward, malicious, defying all domestic control; or who want that restraint over the passions without which the female character is lost. For these also such protection, seclusion, and order, and systematic treatment as can only be afforded in an asylum, are often indispensable. Without early attention and more careful superintendence than can be exercised at home, or in any private family, [many] will become ungovernably mad, and remain so for life.^[226]

Conolly's eagerness to consign the morally perverse and socially inadequate to the asylum was widely shared by his colleagues,^[227] but seen in other quarters as a dangerous blurring of immorality and insanity.^[228] In addition, many of the public were inclined to believe that alienists' willingness to define others as mad on such slender pretext reflected their financial interests in expanding their pool of patients. Conolly's actions in the Ruck case served only to reinforce these suspicions. Ruck was an alcoholic whose wife had secured his commitment to a private asylum on

[222] John Conolly, A Remonstrance with the Lord Chief Baron Touching the Case Nottidge versus Ripley, 3d ed. (London: Churchill, 1849), 3. See the further discussion of the Notridge case in Chapter 12 below.

[223] T. T. Wingett, The Law of Lunacy Dundee: Chalmers, 1849).

[224] Conolly, Remonstrance, 3.

[225] Ibid., 4–5.

[226] Ibid., 6–7. "Seclusion and systematic snperintendence," were, he continued, "strictly part of the medical treatment in such cases; and to censure those who resort to it is as utterly foolish as it would be to reprove a physician for checking an inflammation by bleeding and blistering before life was endangered, or a surgeon for preventing the progress of a disease of a joint before incurable disorganization rendered amputation unnecessary."

[227] McCandless, "Liberty and Lunacy."

[228] Daily Telegraph, 7 January 1862; The Times, 7, 21, and 31 January 1862; British Medical Journal, 11 January; 8 February 1862.

certificates issued by Conolly and Dr. Richard Barnett. Enforced abstinence brought about a rapid recovery, but several months passed before Ruck, at a cost of 1,100 pounds, secured an inquisition in lunacy, at which a jury found him sane by majority vote. He then sued Conolly and others for false imprisonment. At the trial that followed, Conolly was forced to make a series of damaging admissions. He had issued his certificate of Ruck's lunacy after a joint examination with Barnett, a clear violation of the law; and, more seriously, he had received a fee from Moorcroft House, where he was the consulting physician, for referring Ruck. The jury was obviously not impressed with Conolly's disingenuous defense: "I know the act says that a certificate should not be signed by any medical man connected with the establishment. I do not consider myself connected with the establishment, as I only send male patients to it"!^[229] As a result, he laced a swingeing judgment against him for 500 pounds' damages.

Subsequently, too, his transparent rationalizations and the convenient congruence between his beliefs and his self-interest were savagely burlesqued in Charles Reade's scandalous best-seller, Hard Cash, where Conolly appears in thinly disguised form as the bumbling Dr. Wycherly.^[230] Wycherly, in the sardonic words of Reade's hero, Alfred Hardie, "is the very soul of humanity," in whose asylum there are "no tortures, no handcuffs, nor leg-locks, no brutality."^[231] But his "vast benevolence of manner"^[232] and the "oleaginous periphrasis" of his conversation concealed a second-rate mind "blinded by self interest" and apt to perceive insanity wherever he looked.^[233] In Reade's savage caricature, Conolly/Wycherly's pretensions to gentlemanly status are mocked, and his vaunted psychological acumen exposed as a pious fraud. "Bland and bald," this psychocerebral expert was "a voluminous writer on certain medical subjects . . . a man of large reading and the tact to make it subserve his interests,"^[234] a task in which he was greatly aided by his settled disposition "to found facts on theories instead of theories on facts."^[235] As "a collector of mad people . . . whose turn of mind, cooperating with his instincts, led him to put down any man a lunatic, whose intellect was manifestly superior to his own,"^[236] he is easily duped into diagnosing a sane man as lunatic, and thereafter persists stubbornly in his opinion till the unfortunate inmate is willing to grant that "Hamlet was mad."^[237] In the climactic courtroom

[229] "Report on the Ruck Case," Journal of Mental Science 4 (1858): 131.

[230] Charles Reade, Hard Cash: A Matter-of-Fact Romance (London: Ward, Lock, 1864).

[231] Ibid., 335. The reference to nonrestraint makes transparent who the target is, but Conolly's identity becomes still more blatantly obvious in later passages.

[232] Ibid., 211.

[233] Ibid., 208.

[234] Ibid., 203, 212.

[235] Ibid., 335.

[236] Ibid., 339.

[237] Here, the reference to Conolly was unmistakable, for Conolly's Study of Hamlet, addressed to precisely this issue, had appeared but a few months earlier. Reade maliciously takes his vendetta a step further: Wycherly readily debates the sanity of Alfred Hardie, the young man he has wrongly incarcerated, "with a philosophical coolness, the young man admired, and found it hard to emulate; but this philosophical calmness deserted him the moment Hamlet's insanity was disputed, and the harder he was pressed, the angrier, the louder, the more confused the Psychological physician became; and presently he gut furious, burst out of the anti-spasmodic or round-about style and called Alfred a d——d ungrateful, insolent puppy, and went stamping about the room; and, finally, to the young man's horror, fell down in a fit of an epileptic character, grinding his teeth and foaming at the mouth." Alfred, by now well acquainted with the face of lunacy, has discovered Wycherly's secret: he was himself a monomaniac! (ibid., 340).

scene that brings the melodrama to a close, Reade puts Wycherly on the witness stand and gives him for his lines Conolly's most damaging admissions in the Ruck case. Wycherly, like his alter ego, tries to bluster his way through by protesting that counsel's questions are an affront to his professional dignity—but to no avail. Question:

"Is it consistent with your dignity to tell us whether the keepers of private asylums pay you a commission for all the patients you consign to durance vile by your certificates?" Dr. Wycherly fenced with the question, but the remorseless Colt only kept him longer under torture, and dragged out of him that he received fifteen per cent from the asylum keepers for every patient he wrote insane; and that he had an income of eight hundred pounds a year from that source alone.^[238]

Along with his sometimes embarrassing forays into the courtroom, and his moderately rewarding practice as a consultant,^[239] Conolly was forced to turn to the private "trade in lunacy" as an additional source of income. His private residence, Lawn House, only a stone's throw from Hanwell,^[240] was adapted to take a handful of female patients.^[241] Subse-

[238] Ibid. 453. For someone with a powerful animus against the pretensions of Victorian alienists, Conolly was a tempting target, both because of his eminence and because of his general reputation as a great humanitarian; and in attacking him, Reade was at once ruthless, unscrupulous, and resourceful, not shrinking from quoting Conolly out of context and putting his behavior in the worst possible light. Not surprisingly, Conolly, his family, and friends (who included Charles Dickens, in whose Household Words Reade's novel had first appeared in serial form) were deeply distressed. On this last point, see Richard A. Hunter and Ida Macalpine, "Dickens and Conolly: An Embarrassed Editor's Disclaimer," Times Literary Supplement, 11 August 1961, 534–35.

[239] For instance, papers at the Warwickshire County Record Office reveal that Conolly, together with Samuel Gaskell, the superintendent of the Lancaster County Asylum (and subsequently a commissioner in lunacy), was paid fifty pounds to give advice on the setting up of the new county lunatic asylum.

[240] Apparently he could not bear to leave the site/sight of his earlier triumphs: "No longer residing in Hanwell Asylum, and no longer superintending it, or even visiting it, I continue to live within view of the building and its familiar trees and grounds. The sound of the bell that announces the hours of the patients' dinner still gives me pleasure, because I know that it summons the poorest creature there to a comfortable, well-prepared and sufficient meal; and the tone of the chapel bell, coming across the narrow valley of the Brent still reminds me, morning and evening, of the well-remembered and mingled congregation of the afflicted, and who were then assembling, humble, yet hopeful and not forgotten, and not spiritually deserted" (Conolly, Treatment of the Insane, 341–42).

[241] The annual reports of the commissioners in lunacy reveal an average of five or six present at any one time.

quently, he acquired an interest in another small asylum at Wood End and opened a third house, Hayes Park, in partnership with his brother, William;^[242] and in 1853 he became consulting physician to Moorcroft House Asylum from which he received both a salary and a percentage of the patients' fees.^[243]

"A man," said Conolly a few years later, "must live by his profession, and a physician who devotes himself to mental disorders has to deal with a very small portion of the population, and he generally adds to his consulting practice, the plan of having a place where the treatment of patients can be conducted entirely under his own observation."^[244] There can be no doubt, however, that trading in lunacy was at first distasteful to him. He had long argued that "every lunatic asylum should be the property of the State, and should be controlled by public officers,"^[245] and during his time at Hanwell had become the leading spokesman for the new county asylums. Moreover, with its obvious overtones of "trade" and its long-established unsavory reputation (to which the writings of reformers like himself had in no small measure contributed), the business of running a private asylum was widely regarded as one of the most déclassé forms of medical practice; potentially lucrative, to be sure, but abhorrent to those of gentlemanly sensibilities.

But however repugnant, it was unavoidable. Conolly's income at Hanwell had been "barely sufficient to maintain his family," even with accommodation and food provided. Thrown back entirely on his own resources, he compounded his difficulties by being once more "very liberal-minded in practice and otherwise, and gave little attention to financial matters."^[246] More seriously, however, his household remained a large, even a growing burden. His eldest daughter soon married a missionary stationed in China; but Sophia Jane did not marry until 1852, at the age of twenty-six,^[247] and Anne Caroline not until 1866, at the age of thirty-five.^[248]

Much the greatest source of concern, though, was his son, Edward Tennyson, who far exceeded even his father's youthful fecklessness and displayed a remarkable inability to find any settled pursuit. When he was eighteen, his father's connections had secured him a position as parttime secretary to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. But in 1846, with the disbanding of the society, this came to an end, and the elder Conolly's appeal to Lord Brougham for another patronage ap-

[242] In 1859, he had to rescue this enterprise from bankruptcy.

[243] Hunter and Macalpine, "Introduction," xxxv–xxxvi.

[244] House of Commons, Select Committee on the Care and Treatment of Lunatics, 1859–60, 185.

[245] Conolly, Indications of Insanity, 481.

[246] Maudsley, "Memoir," 172.

[247] To Thomas Harrington Tuke, one of Conolly's former pupils and the proprietor of Chiswick House private asylum.

[248] To Henry Maudsley, another alienist and former pupil.

pointment for his son met with no response.^[249] Five months later, Edward himself renewed the petition, asking specifically for an appointment with the new Railways Commission.^[250] Spurned, he was not discouraged. Three years later, he sought Brougham's assistance to obtain a position as "a Poor Law Inspector," urging his experience as "one of the Guardians of the Poor for Brentford Union, [undertaken] in the absence of any more remunerative employment," as a qualification for the job.^[251] He was no more successful on this occasion, and since he had now reached his late twenties, it seems at last to have occurred to him that further efforts of his own were required. An attempt to practice as a barrister brought no improvement: "Prospects of . . . business are anything but encouraging, and I am every year more desirous of doing something profitable in the world." The upshot was still another appeal to Brougham: "I venture to apply to your lordship to know whether there is likely to be any appointment connected with new Charities Commission which I have any chance of obtaining."^[252] There was not.

Now married, Edward still remained almost entirely dependent on his father's largesse, a burden that was further augmented with the arrival of the first of a series of children. At thirty-three, he had "been four years at the bar; . . . had hardly any practice," and decided to renew his entrearies: "My Lord, I have been so often troublesome with applications that I am ashamed to make another." Nevertheless, he did not let a little embarrassment stand in his way, this time seeking the vacant post of secretary to the Lunacy Commission.^[253] But even the Conolly name could not secure this appointment or a similar post with the Scottish Lunacy Commission, for which he applied some two years later.^[254] As late as 1864, his father still did not know what was to become of him: "Past forty—seven or eight children [sic ]—no present means of educating them, nor of emigration where they might prosper, no friends whom he has continued to see—no prospects at the Bar, etc., etc."^[255] (In 1865, however, a year before his father's death, he finally adopted the favorite strategy for failed scions of the Victorian middle classes, and emigrated to New Zealand, where he became a Supreme Court judge.)^[256]

Faced with these demands on his income, it is not surprising that John Conolly had to swallow his pride and seek financial reward where he

[249] John Conolly to Lord Brougham, 19 June 1846, Brougham Collection, UCL.

[250] Edward Conolly to Lord Brougham, 10 November 1846 (a request he reiterated on 27 November 1846), Brougham Collection, UCL.

[251] Ibid., 3 February 1851.

[252] Ibid., 27 December 1853.

[253] Ibid., 6 December 1855.

[254] Ibid., 8 August 1857. "I do not know if I am asking too much." He was.

[255] John Conolly to Thomas Harrington Tuke, quoted in Hunter and Macalpine, "Introduction," xxxvi.

[256] Leigh, British Psychiatry, 227.

could find it. But just as he had earlier turned from a skeptic about asylum treatment into an advocate of a greatly expanded asylum system, so he now publicly defended the private institutions he once anathematized. Repudiating his prior stance on domestic treatment, he contended that "the management essential to recovery is impracticable in [the lunatic's] own house, or in any private family."^[257] Yet out of the strong desire to conceal the presence of insanity, the wealthy attempted to resort to these expedients, with the result that "the whole house becomes a kind of asylum, but without the advantages of an asylum."^[258] The consequences were necessarily antitherapeutic: "The alarm and even the affection of surrounding friends lead to hurtful concessions and indulgences, and to the withdrawal of all wholesome control; until the bodily disorder present in the first stages is increased, and the mind is much more irritated, thus making eventual recovery more difficult, and often altogether doubtful or impossible."^[259] Still less enviable was the situation of those placed "in detached residences, where no other patient is received." Gloom, solitude, and neglect, both physical and moral, were their lot, "such, indeed, as to make the position of lunatics of wealthy families inferior to that of the lunatic pauper."^[260] Private asylums had once been notorious for similar abuse and neglect. But their current proprietors were, with few exceptions, men "of high character and education"; and the institutions themselves "are now so well conducted as to present every advantage adapted to the richer patients, and to secure all the care and comfort which the poorer patient enjoys in our admirable county asylums"; with the result that the patient's reception into the asylum "is usually followed by an immediate alleviation of his malady, and

[257] John Conolly, "On Residences for the Insane," Journal of Mental Science 5 (1859): 412–13.

[258] Ibid., 413.

[259] Ibid., 412.

[260] Ibid., 415–17. It is instructive to compare these opinions with those voiced only a few years later by Charles Lockhart Robertson and John Charles Bucknill. They had also relinquished the superintendencies of county asylums (Sussex and Devon), but both had subsequently become chancery visitors in lunacy, in that capacity visiting rich lunatics in both asylum ant domestic settings. Robertson confessed, "I could not have believed that patients who were such confirmed lunatics could be treated in private families the way Chancery lunatics are, if I had not personally watched these cases" (House of Commons, Report of the Select Committee on the Operation of the Lunacy Law [1877], 53–55). And Bucknill went further still: "The author's fullest and latest experience has convinced him that the curative influences of asylums have been vastly overrated, and that of isolated treatment in domestic care have been greatly undervalued. . . . It has long been the accepted doctrine [among alienists] that insanity can only he treated curatively in asylums. . . . A wider knowledge of insanity . . . would have taught them that a very considerable number of cases of insanity run a short course and recover in domestic life with no great amount of treatment, and that perhaps not of a very scientific kind" (J. C. Bucknill, The Care of the Insane and Their Legal Control [London: Macmillan, 1880], 114).

he becomes at once surrounded by every circumstance and means favourable to cure."^[261]

This Panglossian portrait was far from universally admired. Sir John Charles Buckhill dismissed private asylums as "institutions for private imprisonment";^[262] and the success of Charles Reade's Hard Cash, a story centering upon the improper confinement of its hero in a series of private madhouses, suggests that Bucknill's opinion reflected a widespread public suspicion.^[263] But Conolly's views certainly corresponded closely with the official mythology of the Victorian asylum system and were fitting for one who now ranked as the doyen of his profession.

The publication of his defense of private asylums represented Conolly's last significant public activity. By 1860, he lived "in an elegant retirement" at Lawn House,^[264] consulting occasionally in difficult cases, but for the most part concentrating upon A Study of Hamlet, an essay designed to show that the prince was indeed mad.^[265] His health steadily worsened until, on 4 March 1866, he suffered a massive stroke. By the following day, he was dead. "His name," as the Journal of Mental Science puts it, "liveth forevermore."^[266]

Not only did John Conolly play a central role in the success of the Victorian lunacy reform movement, but the vicissitudes of his individual biography nicely illustrate some of the general sociological features that attended the constitution of Victorian alienism as a specialism.^[267] His widely publicized work at Hanwell contributed significantly to the crea-

[261] Conolly, "On Residences for the Insane," 417–18.

[262] Bucknill, Care of the Insane, 128.

[263] As Reade put it (Hard Cash, 330): "The tenacity of a private lunatic asylum is unique. A little push behind your back and you slide into one; but to get out again is to scale a precipice with crumbling sides."

[264] Edward Jarvis to Almira Jarvis, 31 May 1860, Jarvis papers, Concord Free Public Library, Concord, Massachusetts. "Dr. Conolly is apparently seventy or more [sic ], yet hale and vigorous; very kind, bland, affectionate in his manners. Having ever cultivated the higher moral and intellectual [sic ], he manifests a beautiful spirit. He is retired from active practice and devotes himself to study, writing, social enjoyment, and some consultation practice."

[265] Cf. John Conolly, A Study of Hamlet (London: Moxon, 1863). See also W. F. Bynum and M. Neve, "Hamlet on the Couch," in The Anatomy of Madness, vol. l, ed. W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd (London: Tavistock, 1985), chap.12.

[266] "Obituary of John Conolly," Journal of Mental Science 12 (1866): 146.

[267] On the constitution of Victorian alienism, see Chapter 6, and Andrew Scull, "Mad-Doctors and Magistrates: English Psychiatry's Struggle for Professional Autonomy in the Nineteenth Century," European Journal of Sociology 17 (1976): 279–305. It would be useful to compare Conolly's career patterns with those of others within the emergent profession of alienism, and I would like briefly and tentatively to address that issue here. The uncertain and halting progress of Conolly's career bears some interesting similarities to that of his contemporary, James Cowles Prichard (see Leigh, British Psychiatry ); and it is equally apparent that by the time of Conolly's death, careers in alienism were developing on a wholly different and much more systematic basis. Instead of the haphazard patterns of recruitment and disparate background experiences that appear to characterize the first generation of nineteenth-century alienists, the growing size and number of public asylums created a substantial and growing number of entry-level positions for assistant physicians. Increasingly, superintendents were recruited from the ranks of these experienced apprentices, in one sense signaling the maturation of the profession of alienism and perhaps contributing to the growing conservatism and Bureaucratic inertia that marked latenineteenth-century asylumdom. Unfortunately, however, it is difficult to go beyond these generalities, since we lack any study of English alienism to compare with John Pitts' interesting study of their American counterparts, "The Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane, 1844–1892: A Case Study of Specialism in American Medicine" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1978). A detailed prosopographical study of the English profession over the course of the nineteenth century would unquestionably be most welcome.

tion of a marketplace for the alienists' services and helped legitimize medical monopolization of the treatment of lunacy. Both ideologically and practically, his activities consolidated the Victorian commitment to institutional "solutions" to the problems posed by the deviant and the dependent. Furthermore, notwithstanding his skepticism about the value of most medical remedies for madness, and his own overt reliance on and preference for moral suasion and management in the treatment of his charges, he was most insistent on the crucial importance of medical control over the treatment of the insane. Any alternative to this professional monopoly he stigmatized as fatally misguided, almost "criminal." In this judgment he echoed and lent the considerable weight of his prestige to the opinions of his colleagues.^[268]

As was generally true of Victorian alienists, it was his prerogatives as a professional that Conolly defended most fiercely against outside threats. Thus it was a proposal to limit the authority of the medical superintendent, not such critical issues as the unwieldy size and organized monotony of the Victorian asylum, that provoked his resignation from Hanwell—though size and routine undoubtedly contributed the more powerfully to the transformation of the ideal of curative institutions into the reality of museums for the collection of the unwanted.^[269] So far from acquiescing in the dilution of his authority, Conolly was among the first to insist that, for the alienist, everything that occurred within the institution was relevant to cure, and in consequence nothing could be safely delegated into lay hands. This claim, as I have pointed out elsewhere,^[270] was widely shared in the profession at this time, reflecting the importance of monopolistic control of asylum administration as support for an otherwise shaky professional authority. Hence the urgency with which alienists sought to persuade their employers that they alone should have

[268] Scull, "Mad-Doctors and Magistrates."

[269] Scull, Museums of Madness, esp. chaps. 3 and 6.

[270] Scull, "Mad-Doctors and Magistrates," 300–302.

authority over the most minute details of day-to-day activity in this "special apparatus for the cure of lunacy."^[271]

As we have seen, Conolly's major concern, in the course of his writings on insanity, was with the administrative aspects of the treatment of insanity, and over the course of his career he evinced a declining interest in contributing to the scientific understanding of the condition itself. Almost certainly, this hierarchy of concerns accounts for a good measure of the hostility that lurked just beneath the surface of Henry Maudsley's strikingly ambivalent "Memoir" of his late father-in-law.^[272] The markedly different—almost diametrically opposed—priorities of these two men (probably the leading figures of their respective generations of British alienists), in turn, mirror the sharp alteration of the context within which the profession operated in the two periods: the movement from what came to be seen as the naive optimism of the first half of the century, that medicine possessed the means to diagnose and successfully treat insanity, to the deepening pessimism of late Victorian psychiatry, with its sense that insanity was all but incurable, the product of defective heredity and Morelian degeneration. For those adhering to the latter orthodoxy, the issue of improving the treatment of the insane naturally lost some of its urgency, to be replaced by the need to explain (or explain away) the profession's apparent therapeutic impotence.

But even Conolly's own position underwent dramatic internal evolution in the course of his career. In his earliest writings on insanity, the product of a period in which he was very much the outside critic of existing practices, he assailed the indiscriminate confinement of the insane, urged the elimination of the private, profit-making "madhouses," and touted the merits of domiciliary care. A decade later, on his appointment as superintendent of one of the largest of the existing county asylums, he became one of the most important and effective proselytes of the expansion of the asylum system, and before long was railing against those who wanted to confine asylum admissions to lunatics dangerous to themselves or others. Toward the close of his career, during a period in which he had become one of the leading private specialists in the treatment of insanity, he exhibited yet another volte-face, using the occasion of his second presidential address to the Medico-Psychological Association to issue a lengthy defense of the social utility—indeed indispensability—of the private asylum system.

It is possible, if one is charitably inclined, to view the evolution of his views as the product of greater experience and maturity. The inex-

[271] Granville, Care and Cure, 1: 15.

[272] "As a writer on insanity, he painted eloquently and pathetically the external features of the disease, but the philosophical depths of mental phenomena he never cared to sound, and the exact scientific investigation of mental disease he never devoted himself to" (Maudsley, "Memoir," 172).

perienced observer of his earlier years was disposed to promote impractical, if superficially attractive, visionary schemes of nonasylum treatment. Later acquaintance with the realities of treating insanity and the therapeutic possibilities of asylum treatment forced him to revise his ideas, as did his subsequent experience of running a private asylum. Equally, of course, one may opt for a cynical interpretation of his intellectual "progress." As Conolly himself remarked, early in his career, "When men's interests depend upon an opinion, it is too much to expect that opinion always to be cautiously formed, or even in all cases honestly given."^[273] The close correspondence between the evolution of his ideas and the unfolding of his career is too marked to escape comment. And even in the nineteenth century, there were those who saw the parallels as more than coincidental. Sir John Charles Buckhill, whose own intellectual development was in precisely the opposite direction to Conolly's—from an enthusiastic advocate to a scathing critic of the asylum system, both public and private^[274] —was convinced that Conolly's judgment had been subverted by self-interest. Praising the positions Conolly had adopted in An Inquiry Concerning the Indications of Insanity ("Nothing which Dr. Conolly ever wrote does more credit to his head and heart than these opinions"), he noted with sorrow his later repudiation of them. One could only regret that "advancing years and personal interests had made him indulgent to the evils he had denounced."^[275]

The less moralistically inclined may prefer to adopt a rather different perspective on the internal evolution of Conolly's ideas. It is instructive to note how difficult it is for modern readers to portray his intellectual journey as "progress." For our generation has learned to view the asylum as an almost unmitigated disaster, a fatally mistaken approach to the problems of managing the mad, and one that cannot be too swiftly consigned to the dustbin of history. Viewed from this perspective, Conolly's changing views appear to mark an almost perverse shift from enlightenment to error. It is to his earliest work that our contemporaries turn, when they count him the author "of principles of treatment that have scarcely been improved in all the succeeding epochs of vanguard practice."^[276] But for the Victorians, it was precisely this early critique of the asylum and advocacy of domiciliary care that was anomalous; and the

[273] Conolly, Indications of Insanity, 3.

[274] Matching the development of his own career, from superintendent of the Devon County Asylum to an extraasylum career as chancellor's visitor in lunacy and as private consultant.

[275] Buckhill, Care of the Insane, 60.

[276] Peter Sedgwick, Psychopolitics (London: Pluto Press; New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 141. For a critique of modern "community care," see Andrew Scull, Decarceration: Community Treatment and the Deviant—A Radical View, 2d ed. (Oxford: Polity Press; New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1984).

abandonment of such aberrant opinions in favor of an elaborate defense of asylum treatment required no special explanation: it simply represented an acknowledgment of the findings of modern medical science. Here, as elsewhere, we observe how slippery the concept of "scientific knowledge" is in the human sciences, and how profoundly dependent the content of that "knowledge" is on the nature of the larger social order.