23 Facts About Henry Maudsley

Henry Maudsley FRCP was a pioneering English psychiatrist, commemorated in the Maudsley Hospital in London and in the annual Maudsley Lecture of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

Henry Maudsley's aunt cared for him, teaching him poetry which he would recite to the servants, and secured for him a top tutor and an expensive apprenticeship to University College London medical school.

Henry Maudsley had apparently intended to pursue a career in surgery, but according to his autobiography, he changed his mind when he failed to receive a reply to his first application: it had gone to his previous address.

Henry Maudsley then decided to leave the country and work for the East India Company, although in the event he never did.

At the age of 23, Henry Maudsley was appointed medical superintendent at the small, middle-class Manchester Royal Lunatic Asylum in Cheadle Royal.

Henry Maudsley returned to London in 1862, taking up residence in Queen Anne St, Cavendish Square.

Henry Maudsley was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and delivered their Gulstonian Lectures in 1870 on Body and Mind.

The text of Henry Maudsley's lectures was studied carefully by Charles Darwin in the preparation of his The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

Henry Maudsley was appointed Professor of Medical Jurisprudence at University College London from 1869 to 1879.

Henry Maudsley married John Conolly's daughter, Ann Conolly, in February 1866, and from 1866 took over the running of Conolly's private mental asylum, Lawn House, housing six wealthy women, until 1874.

Henry Maudsley then withdrew from public life and focused on writing and on an extremely lucrative and secretive private consultancy for the very wealthy, often aristocratic, in the West End of London.

Henry Maudsley acquired a reputation as an outstanding essayist on medical and literary topics.

Henry Maudsley made numerous contributions to the Journal of Mental Science.

Henry Maudsley's popularity was exemplified by his influence on many novels by Rosa Nouchette Carey.

Henry Maudsley adhered to degeneration theory and believed that inherited "taints" were exaggerated through succeeding generations.

Henry Maudsley argued that alcoholism was the most frequent trigger of inherited degeneracy, and that drunkenness in one generation would lead to frenzied need for drink in the second, hypochondria in the third, and idiocy in the fourth.

Henry Maudsley's views on maternity have been critiqued for displaying a "revulsion to both parturition and the care of an infant," which he claimed was an expression of the rational objective truth.

Henry Maudsley was challenged even at the time for his generally negative views on women; a notable early critic was the pioneering female physician Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.

Henry Maudsley was agnostic, and as such critical of religion and reports of ostensibly supernatural phenomena.

Henry Maudsley's book is seen as an early text in the field of anomalistic psychology.

Henry Maudsley submitted articles to the philosophy journal Mind, watched cricket matches and sent postcards.

Henry Maudsley's wife died before him, and they had no children.

Henry Maudsley appears to have destroyed his own papers and correspondence.