Article ID: CBB181490050

The laboratory and the asylum: Francis Walker Mott and the pathological laboratory at London County Council Lunatic Asylum, Claybury, Essex (1895–1916) (2017)

unapi

London County Council’s pathological laboratory in the LCC asylum at Claybury, Essex, was established in 1895 to study the pathology of mental illness. Historians of psychiatry have understood the Claybury laboratory as a predecessor of the Maudsley Hospital in London: not only was this laboratory closed when the Maudsley was opened in 1916, but its director, Frederick Walker Mott, a champion of the ‘German’ model in psychiatry, was instrumental in the establishment of this institution. Yet, as I argue in this essay, for all the continuities with the Maudsley, the Claybury laboratory should not be seen solely as its predecessor – or as a British answer to continental laboratories such as Theodor Meynert’s in Vienna. Rather, as I show using the examples of general paralysis of the insane and ‘asylum colitis’, the Claybury laboratory is best understood as an attempt to prevent mental illness using a microbiological model.

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Authors & Contributors
Hocking, Clare
Nardone, Raffaele
Thabane, Motlatsi
Cox, Stephanie C.
Scrimgeour, David
Jane Freebody
Concepts
Psychiatric hospitals
Mental disorders and diseases
Therapeutic practice; therapy; treatment
Psychiatry
Medicine and society
Patients
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
20th century
Places
England
Scotland
France
United Kingdom
Lesotho
London (England)
Institutions
Salpêtrière, Paris
National Health Service (Great Britain)
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