Maudsley Hospital

   , London. In 1908, the Asylums Committee of the London County Council decided to accept a generous gift that Henry Maudsley was offering for the foundation of a mental hospital—not, he stressed, an "asylum"—that would incorporate an outpatient department, laboratories, and instruct medical students. It would be based on the German model of the university psychiatric clinic—yet at the same time, Maudsley had a distrust of German theoretical formulations. During the First World War, the army converted the newly finished structure into a military hospital, but in 1923 it opened its doors to psychiatric patients. Edward Mapother (1881–1940), the first medical superintendent, had simultaneously become in 1922 physician in psychological medicine to King’s College Hospital and wanted to make the Maudsley the postgraduate school for the psychiatric teaching of the college. Well before the hospital opened for psychiatric uses, in 1916 the London County Council’s Pathological Laboratory, based at Claybury asylum since 1895, was transferred to the Maudsley. Frederick W. Mott (1853–1926) had been its first director (until 1923), Frederic L. Golla (1878–1968) its second until his retirement in 1938, and neurologist Samuel Nevin (1905–1979) its third from 1945. As Bethlem Royal Hospital archivist Colin Gale has remarked, "In many ways it was the precursor of the Institute of Psychiatry itself" (see below).

   In 1924, the Maudsley Hospital was recognized by the University of London as one of its "Schools," the title "professor" being created for Mapother in 1936. Two years later, a research laboratory became funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Thus, after the disruption of wartime, a nucleus was present for the creation of a teaching unit in psychiatry, in addition to the hospital functions. In 1946, Aubrey Lewis was appointed professor of psychiatry in the university (having been clinical director of the Maudsley since 1936). Under the guidance of Lewis, in 1948 the hospital school became part of the the newly founded British Postgraduate Medical Federation, and the medical school was renamed the Institute of Psychiatry (IOP); Lewis became director of the IOP, a postgraduate educational unit outside the National Health Service. As well in 1948, the Maudsley Hospital merged with the Bethlem Royal Hospital. Starting in the late 1940s, Lewis began to beef up the research arm of the Institute by adding Medical Research Council (MRC) Units. In 1948, Lewis created the MRC Occupational Psychiatry Research Unit at the Maudsley (after 1958, it became the Social Psychiatry Research Unit); this was the first Medical Research Council Unit with a psychiatrist in command. When Lewis stepped down in 1965 as director, John Wing reconstituted it as a new Social Psychiatry Research Unit (director from 1965 to 1989). Julian P. Leff (1938–) was the subsequent director from 1989 to 1995. The unit closed in 1995 as it merged with the Social, Genetic and Development Psychiatric Research Centre of the Maudsley, with Sir Michael Rutter (1933–) the new director. In 1959, Eliot Slater helped create the MRC Psychiatric Genetics Unit. It closed with his retirement in 1969, but a psychiatric genetics section continued on at the Maudsley under the department of psychiatry.

   In 1984, Rutter helped create the MRC Child Psychiatry Unit; in 2000, it became integrated with the new Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Research Centre, of which Rutter had just become director (followed in 1998 by Peter McGuffin). After Lewis retired in 1966, Denis Hill (1913–) became professor and director of the Maudsley, retiring in 1979. He was succeeded by Gerald F. M. Russell (1928–), who had coined the term "bulimia" nervosa. David Goldberg (1934–), a psychiatric epidemiologist who in 1970 developed the General Health Questionnaire, a widely used screening instrument in epidemiological psychiatry first described in the British Medical Journal, served as the chair holder from 1993 to 2000; Goldberg was, strictly speaking, the last professor of psychiatry at the Maudsley, because in 1999, the Institute of Psychiatry split from the Maudsley and became a school of King’s College London. Robin Murray became the professor of psychiatry in 2000 and serves to date.