Medico-Psychologists, Maudsley and the Maudsley

Extract

Four circumstances—in addition to my own limitations as a historian—have determined my choice of subject for this evening. Last November this Institute celebrated its Jubilee—that is, the 50th anniversary of the recognition of the Maudsley Hospital as a School of the University of London. In the following month the one-time Medico-Psychological Association, which owed its very name to a suggestion by Henry Maudsley, and has now developed into the Royal College of Psychiatrists, moved into its new headquarters in Belgrave Square. Since then we have had to mourn the death of Sir Aubrey Lewis, one of whose outstanding contributions to the Association, and to psychiatric history, was his Maudsley Lecture of 1951, devoted to the work and influence of Henry Maudsley.† Moreover, the early ‘70s are the centenary years of Maudsley's period of office as the senior editor of the Journal of Mental Science, now the British Journal of Psychiatry, with which I myself have long been associated. So it seemed that it might be appropriate for me to tell you something about the history of the Association, about Maudsley's relations with it, and about the various ideas, proposals and actions which eventually led to the foundation of this Hospital and Institute. In doing this I hope to furnish a few footnotes, as it were, to Sir Aubrey's Maudsley and Mapother Lectures, and these will be my personal tribute to one whom so many of us have held in affectionate admiration.