Maudsley Hospital

Psychiatric hospital in London, England

The Maudsley Hospital is a British psychiatric hospital in south London. The Maudsley is the largest mental health training institution in the UK. It is part of South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, and works in partnership with the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London. The hospital was one of the originating institutions in producing the Maudsley Prescribing Guidelines. It is part of the King's Health Partners academic health science centre and the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Biomedical Research Centre for Mental Health.

The Maudsley story dates from 1907, when once leading Victorian psychiatrist Henry Maudsley offered London County Council £30,000 (apparently earned from lucrative private practice in the West End) to help found a new mental hospital that would be exclusively for early and acute cases rather than chronic cases, have an out patients' clinic and provide for teaching and research. Maudsley's associate Frederick Walker Mott had proposed the original idea and he conducted the negotiations, with Maudsley remaining anonymous until the offer was accepted. Mott, a neuropathologist, had been influenced by a visit to Emil Kraepelin's psychiatric clinic with attached postgraduate teaching facilities in Munich, Germany. The Council agreed to contribute half the building costs eventually rising to £70,000 and then covered the running costs which were almost twice as high per bed as the large asylums. The hospital also incorporated the Central Pathological Laboratory, transferred from Claybury Hospital, run by Mott. In the interwar period the Maudsley Hospital engaged in widespread experimentation with animal hormones, both in small doses to rectify supposed deficits and in overdoses as a shock therapy. Numerous psychoactive drugs and procedures were tried out, in what has been described as 'unconstrained experimentation'. One of those involved, as a trainee and then junior doctor, was the controversial William Sargant. The Maudsley Hospital Medical School was established in 1924 and eventually became a well respected teaching centre. In 1932, Mapother described it as "the main postgraduate school of mental medicine in England." The Maudsley Hospital had initially struggled to secure funding from the Medical Research Council, and, to undertake further research and develop the Medical School, but a substantial grant was obtained in 1938 from American charity the Rockefeller Foundation. Originally, there was no provision for the treatment of children and the rapid growth in this patient population was unforeseen. A child guidance clinic was set up under the directorship of Dr William Moodie, the deputy medical superintendent, in 1928. With the spread of National Socialist (Nazi) laws in Germany from 1933, however, they decried the Nazi conflation of therapy and punishment, a move partly attributed to political and funding expediency. The Maudsley maintained its links with Germany, taking on both pro Nazis and Jewish emigres through fellowships provided by the Commonwealth Fund and, after 1935, large scale funds from the American Rockefeller Foundation. Eliot Slater continued to visit Munich through the 1930s and contributed to academic festivities honouring Nazi eugenicist Ernst Rudin. During this time, Maudsley psychiatry developed a distinctive combination of practical experimentation and intellectual scepticism. Influential psychiatrist Aubrey Lewis became clinical director of the Maudsley in 1936. At the outbreak of the Second World War, and with the threat of air raids, the Maudsley Hospital closed and staff dispersed to two locations: a temporary hospital at Mill Hill School in north London and Belmont Hospital in Sutton, Surrey. In 1999, the Maudsley Hospital became part of the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust ("SLaM"), along with the Bethlem Royal Hospital.

Annie Altschul CBE pioneer of mental health nursing in the UK.