HISTORY OF PSYCHIATRY SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP
Workshop: Ready, Steady, HoP!
29 October 2015
Abstracts and biographies
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The treatment war neuroses at Mill Hill Hospital in 1943
Edgar Jones
Abstract
In 1943, Basil Wright produced a documentary film about the treatment of servicemen
and civilians with psychological disorders at Mill Hill Hospital. Funded by the Ministry
of Information, Neuro Psychiatry 1943 was shot to convince influential clinicians and
policy makers in North America that the British had developed new expertise in the
management of psychiatric casualties. By emphasizing novel and apparently effective
interventions and excluding severe or intractable cases from the film, Wright
encouraged an optimistic sense of achievement. Filmed at a time when victory was
considered an eventual outcome, the picture presented a health service to which all
had access without charge. Women not in employment and children, two groups
excluded under the 1911 National Insurance Act, had to pay for healthcare in the prewar period and were shown receiving free treatment from the Emergency Medical
Service. However, the therapeutic optimism presented in the film proved premature.
Most UK battle casualties arose in the latter half of the conflict and the positive
outcome statistics reported in the film were not confirmed by follow-up studies. Aubrey
Lewis, clinical director of the hospital, criticised the research projects for a lack of rigor.
The cinematographic skills of Wright and the director Michael Hankinson, together with
their reformist agenda, created a clinical picture at Mill Hill that emphasised
achievements without acknowledging the limitations not only of the therapies available
to doctors but also the resources available to a nation at war. Recent evidence
suggests that the Mill Hill documentary provided a model for John Huston’s film of US
psychiatric casualties, Let There be Light.
Biography
Edgar Jones is professor of the history of medicine and psychiatry at the Institute of
Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience. He originally trained as an historian before
completing a doctorate in clinical psychopathology at Guy’s Hospital and training as a
psychodynamic psychotherapist. He is programme leader for the MSc in War and
Psychiatry and works in the field of military psychiatry exploring how both soldiers and
civilians cope with the stress of war and its enduring effects on their mental state. He
is the co-author of Shell Shock to PTSD, Military Psychiatry from 1900 to the Gulf, Hove:
Psychology Press, Maudsley Monograph (2005). He is currently studying how veterans
of World War Two managed the transition to civilian life and, for those suffering from
psychological disorders, what factors facilitated or inhibited recovery. He is the acting
Chairman and Honorary Treasurer of the mental health charity Careif (Centre for
Applied Research and Evaluation International Foundation).
Edgar Jones, Neuro Psychiatry 1943: The Role of Documentary Film in the Dissemination of
Medical Knowledge and Promotion of the U.K. Psychiatric Profession J Hist Med Allied Sci.
2014 Apr; 69(2): 294–324. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3992992/
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Bleeding Lunatics: Nineteenth-century medical discourse on bloodletting for
the treatment of mental disorders
Elizabeth Hardwick
Abstract
Despite the huge amount of academic work on the history of psychiatry, over the last
30 years, the medical treatments used by physicians have received comparatively little
attention. The use of bloodletting in particular has been a neglected area of research.
Accounts have generally concentrated on psychological or ‘moral’ therapies, or as
Samuel B. Thielman pointed out, have centred on physicians as agents of
societal/government control rather than as practitioners whose therapeutic efforts
reflected the theoretical and clinical concerns of the larger medical profession.
This talk is a review the nineteenth-century medical discourse on the use of
bloodletting in the treatment of mental disorder. I will discuss the contemporary
theories on the origins of insanity, these included debates around somatic versus
psychological causes and overlapped with wider philosophical ideas on mind/body
duality dating back to the eighteenth-century
I will attempt to answer a number of questions. What theories were behind its use as
a treatment? What disorders was it used in? What disorders was it not used in and
why this was? Were patient characteristics other than diagnosis a factor? Were the
social demographics of the patient a factor in its use? When was it carried out? How
much was taken? Where on the body was blood taken from? Who performed the
procedure and how often? How were the effects monitored if at all?
Biography
Elizabeth Hardwick is a consultant in General Adult Psychiatry at Avon and Wiltshire
Partnership Trust. She completed a MA at the Centre for the History of Medicine
(CHM) at Warwick University in 2014 while continuing to do clinical work. She was one
of the panel of experts for CHM's production of ‘Trade in Lunacy’ in 2013 and is now
actively engaged in ongoing work with Professor Hilary Marland at the CHM.
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Resources and research: what’s new at the Wellcome Library
Ross Macfarlane and Emma Hancox
Abstract
This session will give an overview of relevant resources for the study of the history of
mental health and psychiatry at the Wellcome Library. Starting with an overview of
the collections, the session will focus in particular on two recent developments: an
ambitious project digitising historical records of key UK psychiatric institutions and
personnel and also the cataloguing of the archive of Mind, the mental health charity.
Biographies
Ross MacFarlane is the Research Engagement Officer in the Wellcome Library, where
he is heavily involved in promoting the Library's collections, particularly to academic
audiences. He frequently organises and leads groups visits and classes in the Library,
on diverse topics and subjects. He has researched, talked and written on numerous
topics deriving from the Wellcome Library’s collections, including lectures and talks at
such institutions as the Hunterian Museum, Bishopsgate Institute and the Royal
Society.
Emma Hancox is Assistant Archivist in Digital Discovery and Delivery at the Wellcome
Library. As part of her role she works on cataloguing the archive of Mind the mental
health charity, and also Project Managing the Wellcome Library’s mental health
archives digitisation project which aims to bring together 800,000 pages of mental
health archives online.
Welcome Library notes:
Everything you need to know to start your history of psychiatry research at the
Wellcome Library http://wellcomelibrary.org/
(remotely, if you don’t get to London very often…..)
How to join
http://wellcomelibrary.org/using-the-library/joining-the-library/
How to use the Library
http://wellcomelibrary.org/using-the-library/how-to/
Remote access electronic resources you get as a Wellcome Library member:
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http://wellcomelibrary.org/using-the-library/how-to/databases-a-z/
Free online material
Wellcome Images, our picture library
http://wellcomeimages.org/
All the historical images are free to download high-res: http://blog.wellcomelibrary.org/2014/01/thousands-of-years-of-visual-culture-madefree-through-wellcome-images/
Free online material
Digital collections
http://wellcomelibrary.org/collections/digital-collections/
including the mental healthcare project
http://wellcomelibrary.org/collections/digital-collections/mental-healthcare/
Archives and manuscripts in the Wellcome Library
http://wellcomelibrary.org/collections/about-the-collections/archives-and-manuscripts/
Papers pertaining to Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology
People
http://wellcomelibrary.org/content/documents/31302/psychiatry-personal-papers.pdf
Institutions
http://wellcomelibrary.org/content/documents/31302/psychiatry-psychologypsychoanalysis-institutions-archives.pdf
The Mind archive
Over 80 boxes of material from the archive Mind, the leading mental health charity in
England and Wales are now available for consultation in the Wellcome Library. Mind
began life as the National Association for Mental Health (NAMH) in 1946, but it owes
its name to the Mind Appeal, a 1970s fundraising campaign launched by David
Ennals.
A post from the Library blog introduces the collection:
http://blog.wellcomelibrary.org/2014/10/keeping-mental-health-in-mind/
That post has a link through to the archive catalogue for Mind.
Blog
http://blog.wellcomelibrary.org/
Twitter
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https://twitter.com/WellcomeLibrary
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