Henry Maudsley: Victorian psychiatrist. A bibliographical study

MICHAEL COLLIE, Henry Maudsley: Victorian psychiatrist. A bibliographical study, Winchester, St Paul's Bibliographies, 1988, 8vo, pp. xvii, 205, illus., £30.00. Henry Maudsley (1835-1918) has remained strangely elusive despite his apparent familiarity. Quoted at will, and usually with disapproval, by modern commentators, he provides the archetypal image of the Victorian alienist. But behind the twelve principal books and 80 or more articles, reviews, and pamphlets there is very little else to grasp. There are some letters, the usual obituaries, the minutes of the Medico-Psychological Association (MPA) and a brief autobiographical fragment, but no biography of note and some large lacunae. While therefore it may seem odd that a professor of English should choose to write a bibliographical study of an "organic" psychiatrist, it should nevertheless be welcomed. After all, Maudsley wrote of Shakespeare "Testimonied in his own Bringingsforth", so why not bring forth Maudsley in his own writings. They are the essence of the man, in all their stolid grandeur, and their often convoluted style and repeated contradictions (as well as their second-hand rarity) make them less than accessible today. Professor Collie regards his study as a "work of recovery and restoration", and he has written a "longish, [79 pages] non-specialist introduction outlining the main events of Maudsley's career". The bibliographical details have all the attributes beloved of the first-class book-dealer's catalogue ("Front cover Five blind-stamped rules at top and bottom") as well as the alchemical mysteries of pagination (Collation [A]4 B-y8; 172 leaves (21.6 x 14); [i]-viii [1}-333 [334-6]"). He has also summarized 54 of the signed articles, and this detail is an admirable strength of the book. Two appendices include an autobiographical piece, written about 1907, and part of Maudsley's contribution-on therapeutics-to Reynold's 1866 System of medicine. There is no doubt therefore that the work of recovery (including some nice photographs) has been thorough, and will be indispensable to future analyses of Victorian psychiatry. The disappointment of this work is the lack of references. There is an index of course and a brief 'Selected reading list', but many statements, especially in the introduction, are left unsupported. We are told of a letter to the Daily Telegraph claiming that Maudsley knew the Ripper (p.xvi). We are told "there was no point in looking back in time to anything before 1867" (p. 25) and that "novelists read his works with greater attention than he reads theirs" (p. 68). This is perhaps allowable as an imaginative recreation of a life, but a documentary life, as Schoenbaum's Shakespeare, need not be thus adorned. The constant use of the phrase "must have" illustrates the problem. Much that Maudsley said-in the minutes of the MPA and before an 1877 Select Committee-was recorded verbatim, so why not quote directly? Nevertheless, the facts remain indispensable. There is a most useful discussion of the relation between Maudsley's work and that of Gissing and Meredith-both the subjects of previous bibliographies by Collie-and an elucidation of the public role of the law report in a world of hidden psychiatry. Maudsley's key first work, The physiology andpathology ofmind (1867) also emerges as the book no one else quite dared to write. Now that someone has dared to write the first book about Henry Maudsley, it may be possible to begin a true historical evaluation of his much maligned profession.