18 Facts About Ronald Hargreaves

George Ronald Hargreaves OBE, FRCP, MRCS was a civilian and military psychiatrist.

Ronald Hargreaves was educated at Mill Hill School and then studied medicine at University College London, where he was involved in the students' dramatic society.

Ronald Hargreaves then attended University College Hospital Medical School, where he had the opportunity to become house physician and house surgeon.

Ronald Hargreaves was unable to take up this appointment because the death of his father required him to take paid work to support his younger siblings.

Ronald Hargreaves was reluctant to spend time on unnecessary postgraduate training and examinations when he had already secured the first openings in his chosen specialism.

In 1938, Ronald Hargreaves was appointed full physician at the Tavistock Clinic and Eva gained her diploma in anaesthetics.

When World War II broke out, Ronald Hargreaves volunteered for the Royal Army Medical Corps to serve as a psychiatrist.

Ronald Hargreaves paid particular attention to Fortescue's History of the British Army and a book on Army psychiatry written by the American psychiatrist Thomas Salmon at the end of the First World War, and used the expertise gleaned from these works to impress Army personnel who were sceptical about psychiatrists.

Ronald Hargreaves began his war-work in Northern Command as the Command Psychiatrist.

Ronald Hargreaves argued that more attention should be paid to the circumstances of the breakdown, rather than purely focussing on background and patient history.

Ronald Hargreaves shaped the work conducted at Northfield Military Hospital by encouraging Harold Bridger to follow up on the group therapy work that Wilfred Bion and John Rickman had initiated, and by passing information on the Northfield experiments to Karl Menninger for the Journal of the Menninger Clinic.

In due course, Ronald Hargreaves was promoted out of the Command, to take his ideas Army-wide, based at the War Office.

Ronald Hargreaves worked at the WHO from 1948 to 1955, when he retired in order to take up an academic post at home.

At Leeds, Ronald Hargreaves worked with colleagues such as Max Hamilton, running trials on chlorpromazine.

Hamilton and Ronald Hargreaves developed a number of scales to measure anxiety, including the HAMA.

Ronald Hargreaves was elected MRCP in 1959 and FRCP in 1962.

Ronald Hargreaves collected flamenco records and had an expert knowledge of flamenco dancing.

Hargreaves' wife Eva died at the beginning of 1962 and Ronald himself died young, after an operation, on 18 December of the same year.