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John Conolly and the treatment of mental illness in early Victorian England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Camilla M. Haw
Camilla M. Haw*
Affiliation:
St Mary Abbots Hospital, London W8
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This year, 1989, marks the 150th anniversary of the abolition of mechanical restraints at the Hanwell Asylum. It was, of course, John Conolly who carried out this large-scale experiment in the application of non-restraint at Hanwell. He was in charge of the diagnosis and treatment of the 800-odd pauper lunatics in this, the largest of the county asylums. Most of his patients had been insane for many years before their admission to Hanwell from the parish workhouses. The prospects of curing them were slim: Hanwell had the second lowest cure rate among the county asylums, a meagre 6% for the period 1835–1845 (Conolly, 1847).

Type
Sketches from the History of Psychiatry
Information
Psychiatric Bulletin , Volume 13 , Issue 8 , August 1989 , pp. 440 - 444
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1989

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