Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T09:26:33.809Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Ambition, ‘failure’ and the laboratory: Birmingham as a centre of twentieth-century British scientific psychiatry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2021

Abstract

This article will reveal how local scientific determination and ambition, in the face of rejection by funders, navigated a path to success and to influence in national policy and international medicine. It will demonstrate that Birmingham, England's ‘second city’, was the key centre for cutting-edge biological psychiatry in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. The ambitions of Frederick Mott – doyen of biochemistry, neuropathology and neuropsychiatry, until now celebrated as a London figure – to revolutionize psychiatric treatment through science, chimed with those of the City and University of Birmingham's Joint Board of Research for Mental Diseases. Under Mott's direction, shaped by place and inter-professional working, the board's collaborators included psychiatrist Thomas Chivers Graves and world-renowned physiologist J.S. Haldane. However, starved of external money and therefore fresh ideas, as well as oversight, the ‘groupthink’ that emerged created the classic UK focal sepsis theory which, it was widely believed, would yield a cure for mental illness – a cure that never materialized. By tracing the venture's growth, accomplishments and contemporary potential for biochemical, bacterial and therapeutic discoveries – as well as its links with scientist and key government adviser Solly Zuckerman – this article illustrates how ‘failure’ and its ahistorical assessment fundamentally obscure past importance, neglect the early promise offered by later unsuccessful science, and can even hide questionable research.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of British Society for the History of Science.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Anon., ‘Memorandum of the evidence given on May 4 and 5 1925, on behalf of the Royal Commission on Lunacy and Mental Disorder (passed by the Association at the Quarterly Meeting, November 20, 1924). With appendices’, Journal of Mental Science (1925) 71, pp. 493–558, 513.

2 Anon., op. cit. (1), p. 515.

3 Anon., op. cit. (1), p. 517.

4 See Hayward, R., ‘Germany and the making of “English” psychiatry: the Maudsley Hospital, 1908–1939’, in Roelcke, V., Weindling, P.J. and Westwood, L. (eds.), International Relations in Psychiatry: Britain, Germany, and the United States to World War II, London, Boydell & Brewer, 2010, pp. 6790Google Scholar.

5 Noll, R., ‘Infectious insanities, surgical solutions: Bayard Taylor Holmes, dementia praecox and laboratory science in early 20th-century America. Part 1’, History of Psychiatry (2006) 17(2), pp. 183204CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 183–4. See also Noll, ‘Infectious insanities, surgical solutions: Bayard Taylor Holmes, dementia praecox and laboratory science in early 20th-century America. Part 2’, History of Psychiatry (2006) 17(3), pp. 299–311.

6 Quick, T., ‘From phrenology to the laboratory: physiological psychology and the institution of science in Britain (c.1830–1880)’, History of the Human Sciences (2014) 27(5), pp. 5473CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 69.

7 See, for example, J.T. Braslow, Mental Ills and Bodily Cures: Psychiatric Treatment in the First Half of the Twentieth Century, London: University of California Press, 1997; J. Gach, ‘Biological psychiatry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, in E.R. Wallace IV and J. Gach, History of Psychiatry and Medical Psychology: With an Epilogue on Psychiatry and the Mind–Body Relation, New York: Springer, 2008, pp. 381–418; E.S. Valenstein, Great and Desperate Cures: The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery & Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness, New York: Basic Books, 1986.

8 A. Cunningham and P. Williams (eds.), The Laboratory Revolution in Medicine, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

9 C.G. Douglas, ‘John Scott Haldane, 1860–1936’, in Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society (1936) 2, pp. 114–39; M. Goodman, Suffer and Survive. Gas Attacks, Canaries, Spacesuits and the Bends: The Extreme Life of J.S. Haldane, New York: Pocket Books, 2008; S.E. Mathews, ‘Matter over mind: the contribution of the neuropathologist Sir Frederick Walker Mott to British psychiatry, c.1895–1926’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Manchester, 2006; Meyer, A., ‘Frederick Mott, founder of the Maudsley Laboratories’, British Journal of Psychiatry (1973) 122, pp. 497516Google ScholarPubMed; W.J. O'Connor, British Physiologists 1885–1914: A Biographical Dictionary, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991; E.A. Sharpey-Schafer, ‘Mott, Sir Frederick Walker (1853–1926)’ (rev. Rachel E. Davies), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 1926/2004, at www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/35127, accessed 9 January 2019; S.W. Sturdy, ‘A co-ordinated whole: the life and work of John Scott Haldane’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1987; Sturdy, ‘From the trenches to the hospitals at home: physiologists, clinicians and oxygen therapy’, in J.V. Pickstone (ed.), Medical Innovations in Historical Perspective, London: MacMillan, 1992, pp. 104–23; Sturdy, ‘Haldane, John Scott (1860–1936)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, at www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/33642, accessed 9 January 2019.

10 A. Scull, ‘Focal sepsis and psychosis: the career of Thomas Chivers Graves, BSc, MD, FRCS, MRCVS (1883–1964)’, in H. Freeman and G.E. Berrios (eds.), 150 Years of British Psychiatry, vol. 2: The Aftermath, London: Athlone Press, 1996, pp. 517–36; Scull, ‘Somatic therapies and twentieth century psychiatry: problems and prospects’, in T. Hamanaka and G. Berrios (eds.), Two Millennia of Psychiatry in West and East: Selected Papers from the International Symposium ‘History on the Threshold to the 21st Century,’ 20–21 March 1999, Nagoya, Japan, Tokyo: Gakuju Shoin, 2003, pp. 193–206; Scull, Madhouse: A Tragic Tale of Megalomania and Modern Medicine, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2007.

11 D. Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge, London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003.

12 M. Hammerborg, ‘The laboratory and the clinic revisited: the introduction of laboratory medicine into the Bergen General Hospital, Norway’, Social History of Medicine (2011) 24, pp. 758–75. C. Lawrence, Rockefeller Money, the Laboratory and Medicine in Edinburgh 1919–1930: New Science in an Old Country, New York: University of Rochester Press, 2005.

13 Jacyna, L.S., ‘The laboratory and the clinic: the impact of pathology on surgical diagnosis in the Glasgow Western Infirmary, 1875–1910’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine (1988) 3, pp. 384406Google Scholar; G. Davis, ‘The Cruel Madness of Love’: Sex, Syphilis and Psychiatry in Scotland, 1880–1930, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008, p. 241.

14 R.E. Kohler, From Medical Chemistry to Biochemistry: The Making of a Biomedical Discipline, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

15 S. Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994; B. Latour and S. Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, New York: Sage Publications, 1979.

16 Shapin, op. cit. (15), pp. 409–17, 416.

17 E.J. Engstrom, Clinical Psychiatry in Imperial Germany: A History of Psychiatric Practice (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 107.

18 For more see M. Finn, ‘The West Riding Lunatic Asylum and the making of the modern brain sciences in the nineteenth century’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leeds, 2012; J. Wallis, Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

19 Wallis, op. cit. (18), p. 80.

20 Buklijas, T., ‘The laboratory and the asylum: Francis [sic] Walker Mott and the pathological laboratory at London County Council Lunatic Asylum, Essex (1895–1916)’, History of Psychiatry (2017) 28(3), pp. 311–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Davis, op. cit. (13), pp. 129–30.

22 For more see P. Michael, ‘Welsh psychiatry during the interwar years, and the impact of American and German inspirations and resources’, in Roelcke, Weindling and Westwood, op. cit. (4), pp. 197–217; Michael, ‘Prolonger narcosis therapy in the interwar years’, in H.-W. Schmuhl and V. Roelcke, Heroische Therapien: Die deutsch Psychiatrie im internationalen Vergleich, 1918–1945, Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2013, pp. 114–30.

23 For more see, for example, R. Noll, ‘The blood of the insane’, History of Psychiatry (2006) 17, pp. 395–418; Scull, ‘Focal sepsis and psychosis’, op. cit. (10); Scull, Madhouse, op. cit. (10).

24 Scull, Madhouse, op. cit. (10).

25 Scull, Madhouse, op. cit. (10), p. 52.

26 Noll, op. cit. (23), p. 411. Scull, ‘Focal sepsis and psychosis’, op. cit. (10), p. 172; Scull, Madhouse, op. cit. (10), p. 228.

27 See, for instance, E.R. Brown, Rockefeller Medicine: Medicine & Capitalism in America, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979; L.E. Kay, The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rise of the New Biology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993; A. Landsborough Thomson, Half a Century of Medical Research, vol. 1: Origins and Policy of the Medical Research Council (UK), London: HMSO, 1973; Lawrence, op. cit. (12).

28 T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962; Latour and Woolgar, op. cit. (15).

29 Wynter, R., ‘Pictures of Peter Pan: filtering mentally deficient children in early twentieth-century Birmingham’, Family and Community History (2015) 18, pp. 122–38Google Scholar, 127.

30 E. Ives, D. Drummond and L. Schwarz, The First Civic University: Birmingham, 1880–1980. An Introductory History, Birmingham: University of Birmingham, 2000.

31 J. Reinarz, Health Care in Birmingham: The Birmingham Teaching Hospitals, 1779–1939, London: Boydell & Brewer, 2009, p. 165.

32 Sturdy, ‘From the trenches to the hospitals at home’, op. cit. (9), p. 108. E. Jones, ‘An atmosphere of cure: Frederick Mott, shell shock and the Maudsley’, History of Psychiatry (2014) 25(4), pp. 412–21.

33 Wynter, op. cit. (29).

34 Library of Birmingham, Asylums Committee, etc., and Mental Hospitals Committee, Annual Reports 1916–17 to 1937–38 (hereafter ACAR), L47.13, 1922–3, p. 34.

35 ‘Alderman Miss Bartleet Dead’, Evening Dispatch, 26 May 1944, p. 3. See also S. Roberts, ‘“My whole time is given to the service of my fellow citizens”: the first women elected to Birmingham City Council’, The Iron Room: Archives and Collections @ the Library of Birmingham, 4 March 2015, at https://theironroom.wordpress.com/2015/03/04/my-whole-time-is-given-to-the-service-of-my-fellow-citizens-the-first-women-elected-to-birmingham-city-council, accessed 13 March 2020.

36 Anon., ‘Notes and news: the Medico-Psychological Association of Great Britain and Ireland. The Eighty-Fourth Annual General Meeting’, Journal of Mental Science (1925), 71, pp. 797–855, 829, 839.

37 Reinarz, op. cit. (31), p. 230.

38 Scull, Madhouse, op. cit. (10), p. 112.

39 Scull, Madhouse, op. cit. (10). p. 109.

40 Jones, E. and Rahman, S., ‘Framing mental illness, 1923–1939: the Maudsley Hospital and its patients’, Social History of Medicine (2008), 21, pp. 107–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 111.

41 Library of Birmingham, ‘City of Birmingham: Joint Board of Research for Mental Disease Minute Book, No. 1’ (hereafter JBM), 7 December 1922–30 May 1933, BCC1/FE/1/1/1, 7 December 1922.

42 JBM, op. cit. (41), 13 February 1923.

43 JBM, op. cit. (41), 7 December 1922.

44 JBM, op. cit. (41), 7 June 1923.

45 JBM, op. cit. (41), ‘Annual Report, June 1924’, p. 2.

46 JBM, op. cit. (41), ‘Circular to Midlands Hospitals’.

47 Wallis, op. cit. (18), p. 81.

48 JBM, op. cit. (41), 5 June 1924.

49 JBM, op. cit. (41), ‘Letter to Barling, 23 June 1925’.

50 Meyer, op. cit. (9), p. 506; G. Shuttleworth and W.A. Potts, Mentally Defective Children: Their Treatment and Training, 5th edn, London: H.K. Lewis & Co., 1922, p. 78.

51 B. Evans and E. Jones ‘Organ extracts and the development of psychiatry: hormonal treatments at the Maudsley Hospital, 1923–1938’, Journal of the History of Behavioural Sciences (2012) 48, pp. 251–76, 251. For an overview of iodine see J. Lindholm and P. Laurberg, ‘Hypothyroidism and thyroid substitution: historical aspects’, Journal of Thyroid Research, 2011, pp. 1–10.

52 JBM, op. cit. (41), ‘Letter to Barling, June 1925’.

53 F.A. Pickworth, ‘A method for the estimation of iodine in thyroid gland’, Biochemical Journal (1925) 19, pp. 768–72. JBM, op. cit. (41), 30 June 1935.

54 JBM, op. cit. (41), ‘Annual Report, 1925’, p. 1.

55 JBM, op. cit. (41), 19 June 1926. JBM, op. cit. (41), ‘Director's Report, 16 June 1928’, p. 2.

56 JBM, op. cit. (41), 29 June 1927.

57 Anon. op. cit. (36), pp. 828, 846.

58 JBM, op. cit. (41), ‘Annual Report, 1927’, p. 2.

59 JBM, op. cit. (41), ‘Annual Report, 1929’, p. 3.

60 JBM, op. cit. (41), June 1924.

61 F.A. Pickworth, ‘Basal metabolism as determined by the respiratory exchange’, communicated by J.S. Haldane, Proceedings of the Royal Society B (1927) 101(708), pp. 163–85, 163.

62 JBM, op. cit. (41), ‘Annual Report, 1924’, p. 1.

63 Pickworth, op. cit. (61), pp. 163–4.

64 E. Dwyer, ‘Neurological patients as experimental subjects: epilepsy studies in the United States’, in L.S. Jacyna and S.T. Casper (eds.), The Neurological Patient in History, New York: University of Rochester, 2012, pp. 44–62.

65 Pickworth, op. cit. (61), p. 164.

66 JBM, op. cit. (41), ‘Annual Report, 1925’, p. 2.

67 P. Tanskanen, M. Happea, J. Veijola, J. Miettunen, M-R. Jarvelin, J. Pytinen, P.B. Jones and M. Isohanni, ‘Volumes of brain, grey and white matter and cerebrospinal fluid in schizophrenia in northern Finland 1966 birth cohort: an epidemiological approach to analysis’, Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging (2009) 174, pp. 116–20, 118.

68 M.L. Meldrum, ‘A brief history of the randomized controlled trial: from oranges and lemons to the gold standard’, Hematology/Oncology Clinics of North America (2000) 14(4), pp. 745–60.

69 M. Edwards, Control and the Therapeutic Trial: Rhetoric and Experimentation in Britain, 1918–48, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007, p. 11.

70 JBM, op. cit. (41), ‘Annual Report, 1927’, p. 3.

71 JBM, op. cit. (41), ‘Annual Report, 1926’, pp. 8–10.

72 JBM, op. cit. (41), ‘Annual Report, 1928’, p. 2.

73 Anon., ‘Notes and news: City and University of Birmingham Joint Board of Research for Mental Disease’, Journal of Mental Science (1934) 80(320), pp. 173–7, 174.

74 For more see, for example, Shapin, op. cit. (15); P.L. Twohig, ‘“Local girls” and “lab boys”: gender, skill and medical laboratories in Nova Scotia in the 1920s and 1930s’, Acadiensis (2001) 31(1), pp. 55–75.

75 Pickworth, F.A., ‘Perforation of the pituitary fossa by a septic lesion of the sphenoidal sinus associated with recent epilepsy and insanity’, Journal of Laryngology and Otology (1928) 43, pp. 186–90Google Scholar, 188.

76 J.L. Phillips, The Bends: Compressed Air in the History of Science, Diving, and Engineering, New York: Yale University Press, 1998, pp. 121–8.

77 Quote from Woodhouse, D.L. and Pickworth, F.A., ‘The oxygen capacity of the blood in one hundred cases of mental disorder’, Biochemical Journal (1930) 24, pp. 834–49CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, 834; JBM, op. cit. (41), ‘Annual Report, 1930’, p. 3.

78 Woodhouse and Pickworth, op. cit. (77), p. 834.

79 Woodhouse and Pickworth, op. cit. (77), p. 849.

80 JBM, op. cit. (41), ‘Annual Report, 1930’, p. 3.

81 Woodhouse and Pickworth, op. cit. (77).

82 JBM, op. cit. (41), ‘Annual Report, 1930’, p. 3. D.L. Woodhouse and F.A. Pickworth, ‘Permeability of vital membranes: the red blood corpuscle’, Biochemical Journal (1932) 26, pp. 309–16.

83 H.A. Strecker, ‘Investigation of the permeability of the brain membranes in cases of mental disorder’, Journal of Mental Science (1928) 74(304), pp. 73–80.

84 Anon. op. cit. (73), p. 176.

85 K. Jones, A History of the Mental Health Services, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972, p. 153.

86 Anon., ‘The Board of Control and the Mental Treatment Act, 1930’, The Lancet (1930) 216(5591), pp. 921–3, 922.

87 JBM, op. cit. (41), 31 July 1930.

88 JBM, op. cit. (41), 31 July 1930.

89 JBM, op. cit. (41), 8 December 1930.

90 JBM, op. cit. (41), 10 July 1931. JBM, op. cit. (41), 30 July 1832.

91 JBM, op. cit. (41), 28 June 1931.

92 JBM, op. cit. (41), 18 July 1932.

93 JBM, op. cit. (41), 18 July 1932. JBM, op. cit. (41), 10 July 1931.

94 JBM, op. cit. (41), ‘Annual Report, 1933’, p. 4.

95 Michael, ‘Prolonger narcosis therapy’, op. cit. (22), p. 121.

96 JBM, op. cit. (41), ‘Director's Report, May 1933’, p. 1.

97 JBM, op. cit. (41), 8 January 1924.

98 Michael, ‘Welsh psychiatry’, op. cit. (22), p. 210.

99 JBM, op. cit. (41), ‘Annual Report, 1925’, p. 4.

100 JBM, op. cit. (41), ‘Annual Report, 1925’, p. 4.

101 JBM, op. cit. (41), ‘Annual Report, 1924’, p. 3.

102 T.C. Graves, ‘The relation of chronic sepsis to so-called functional mental disorder’, Journal of Mental Science (1923) 69(287), pp. 465–71, 470.

103 Anon., op. cit. (36), p. 839.

104 JBM, op. cit. (41), ‘Annual Report, 1925’, p. 3.

105 JBM, op. cit. (41), ‘Annual Report, 1925’, p. 4.

106 JBM, op. cit. (41), ‘Annual Report, 1926’, p. 1; F.A. Pickworth, ‘Agglutination of typhoid and dysentery organisms by the sera of mental hospital patients’, Journal of Pathology and Bacteriology (1927) 30, pp. 627–40.

107 JBM, op. cit. (41), ‘Annual Report, 1926’, pp. 1–2. JBM, op. cit. (41), ‘Annual Report, 1927’, p. 1.

108 JBM, op. cit. (41), ‘Annual Report, 1927’, p. 2.

109 T.C. Graves and F.A. Pickworth, ‘Sinusitis in the etiology of mental disorder’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine (1928) 21(7), pp. 1267–84; F.A. Pickworth, ‘A case of diplococcal infection of the sphenoid sinus with associated haemorrhages in the stomach’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine (1928) 21(5), pp. 972–84; Pickworth, op. cit. (75); F.A. Pickworth, ‘Variation in agglutinin formation in mental hospital patients and its probable relation to focal sepsis’, Journal of Mental Science (1928) 74(307), pp. 709–19; Pickworth, ‘Confusional insanity with empyema of the sphenoidal sinus’, British Medical Journal (1929) 1(3563), pp. 721–3; Pickworth, ‘A case of mania melancholia with caries of the sphenoid’, Journal of Laryngology and Otology (1929b) 44(11), pp. 250–2; Strecker, op. cit. (83); D.L. Woodhouse, ‘The fat, lipid and cholesterol constituents of adrenals and gonads in cases of mental disease’, Biochemical Journal (1928) 22, pp. 1087–96.

110 JBM, op. cit. (41), ‘Annual Report, 1929’, p. 1.

111 F.A. Pickworth, Chronic Nasal Sinusitis and Mental Disorder, London: H.K. Lewis & Co., 1935.

112 Woodhouse and Pickworth, op. cit. (82).

113 Pickworth, F.A., ‘The influence of septic infection of the sphenoidal sinus upon the cerebral blood supply’, Journal of Laryngology and Otology (1932) 47(12), pp. 797807CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 798.

114 Pickworth, F.A., ‘A new method of study of the brain capillaries and its application to the regional localisation of mental disorder’, Journal of Anatomy (1934) 69, pp. 6271Google ScholarPubMed; Pickworth, ‘Cerebral ischaemia and mental disorder’, Journal of Mental Science (1937) 83(346), pp. 512–33.

115 ACAR, op. cit. (34), 1937–8, pp. 15–16.

116 Anon., op. cit. (73), p. 176.

117 Anon., ‘Mental diseases research centre in the Midlands’, British Medical Journal (1934) 1(3089), p. 32.

118 ACAR, op. cit. (34), ‘Annual Report, 1938’, p. 34.

119 University Archive, Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham, Medical Faculty Minute Book, 1936–8, 12 April 1938, uncatalogued.

120 Pickworth, ‘Cerebral ischaemia’, op. cit. (114), pp. 512–13.

121 Pickworth, ‘Cerebral ischaemia’, op. cit. (114); Pickworth, F.A., ‘A new outlook on the physiology and pathology of mental and emotional states’, British Medical Journal (1938) 1(4022), pp. 265–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

122 Pickworth, op. cit. (121), p. 271.

123 ACAR, op. cit. (34), ‘Annual Report, 1938’, p. 34.

124 University Archive, Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham, ‘Minutes of the First Meeting of the Advisory Board for Research in Mental Diseases’, 9 February 1939, Advisory Board for Research in Mental Disease Minutes, 1938–1945 (hereafter ABM1), UB/COM/41/1, p. 2.

125 ‘Mental Disease Research: Minutes of a Meeting of the Scientific Members of the Advisory Board’, 25 January 1940, ABM1, op. cit. (124).

126 ‘Department of Mental Disease Research: Report of Research for the Year 1941. For consideration of the Meeting of the Board, March 1942’, ABM1, op. cit. (124). For more on Zuckerman's blast experiments see Burney, I., ‘War on fear: Solly Zuckerman and civilian nerve in the Second World War’, History of Human Sciences (2012) 25(5), pp. 4972CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

127 J. Elkes, ‘Psychopharmacology: finding one's way’, in I.G. Farreras, C. Hannaway and V.A. Harden (eds.), Mind, Brain, Body, and Behavior: Foundations of Neuroscience and Behavioral Research at the National Institutes of Health, Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2004, pp. 201–20, 204.

128 ‘Minutes of a Meeting of the Scientific Members of the Mental Disease Advisory Board’, 29 February 1940, ABM1, op. cit. (124).

129 ‘F. Schutz, Report on Research Work for the year 1941’, ABM1, op. cit. (124). ‘Report of F. Schutz’, 1942, ABM1, op. cit. (124).

130 ‘University of Birmingham Meeting of the Advisory Board for Research in Mental Diseases’, 24 May 1945, ABM1, op. cit. (124), p. 3.

131 ‘Meeting of the Scientific Committee of the Advisory Board in Mental Disease Research’, 11 October 1945, ABM1, op. cit. (124).

132 ‘Meeting of the Scientific Committee of the Board of Research into Mental Diseases’, 17 January 1946, Advisory Board for Research in Mental Disease Minutes, 1946–7 (hereafter ABM2), UB/COM/41/2.

133 ‘Meeting of the Advisory Board of Research in Mental Diseases’, 21 March 1946, ABM2, op. cit. (132).

134 ‘Minutes of the Scientific Committee of the Board of Research in Mental Diseases’, 7 February 1946, ABM2, op. cit. (132).

135 ‘Meeting of the Advisory Board on Research in Mental Diseases’, 28 February 1946, ABM2, op. cit. (132).

136 ‘Meeting of the Advisory Board of Research in Mental Diseases’, 21 March 1946, ABM2, op. cit. (132).

137 ‘Meeting of the Scientific Committee of the Board of Research in Mental Disease’, 11 April 1946, ABM2, op. cit. (132).

138 ‘Report from the Director of Research in Mental Disease’, September 1946, ABM2, op. cit. (132).

139 ‘Meeting of the Advisory Board on Research in Mental Diseases’, 28 February 1946, ABM2, op. cit. (132).

140 ‘Meeting of the Advisory Board on Research in Mental Diseases’, 28 February 1946, ABM2, op. cit. (132).

141 ‘Meeting of the Sub-Committee of the Scientific Committee of the Board of Research in Mental Disease’, 16 May 1946, ABM2, op. cit. (132).

142 Elkes, op. cit. (127), p. 204.

143 Ashby, W. Ross, ‘Review: New Outlook on Mental Diseases. By F.A. Pickworth. Bristol: John Wright & Sons, 1952’, Journal of Mental Science (1952) 98(411), pp. 344–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

144 Shapin, op. cit. (15), p. 406.

145 Shapin, op. cit. (15), p. 413.

146 R.C.B., ‘Obituary notices: F. A. Pickworth, B.Sc, M.B., B.S.’, British Medical Journal, 11 November 1967, p. 363.

147 Chedly, J., Soares, S., Montembault, A., von Boxberg, Y., Veron-Ravaille, M., Mouffle, C., M-Benassy, N., Taxi, J., David, L. and Nothias, F., ‘Physical chitosan microhydrogels as scaffolds for spinal cord injury restoration and axon regeneration’, Biomaterials (2017) 138, pp. 91107CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

148 All figures here are those given on Google Scholar, at http://scholar.google.co.uk, accessed 28 October 2018.

149 See, for example, M. Costani, ‘Gut bacteria regulate nerve fibre insulation’, The Guardian, 5 April 2016, at www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2016/apr/05/gut-bacteria-brain-myelin?CMP=share_btn_tw, accessed 1 June 2020; J.R. Kelly, C. Minuto, J.F. Cryan, G. Clarke and T.G. Dinan, ‘Cross talk: the microbiota and neurodevelopmental disorders’, Frontiers in Neuroscience (2017) 11, pp. 1–31; T. Kuntz and J. Gilbert, ‘Microbiome: does the brain listen to the gut?, eLife, 25 May 2016, e17052, DOI: 10.7554/eLife.17052, accessed 1 January 2020; T. Lewis, ‘Stroke alters gut microbiome, impacting recovery’, The Scientist, 15 July 2016, at www.the-scientist.com/daily-news/stroke-alters-gut-microbiome-impacting-recovery-33182, accessed 10 February 2020; Sakar, A., Lehto, S.M., Harty, S., Dinan, T.G., Cryan, J.F. and Burnet, P.W.J., ‘Psychobiotics and the manipulation of bacteria–gut–brain signals’, Trends in Neuroscience (2016) 29(11), pp. 763–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.