Conolly, John (1794-1866)

John Conolly was a physician and alienist born in Lincolnshire on 27 May 1794. He studied at Edinburgh University and graduated MD in 1821 and during his time there he served as one of the four annual presidents of the Royal Medical Society. In 1822 he moved to Stratford upon Avon where he took a leading role in establishing a dispensary for the sick poor, was elected to the town council, twice served as mayor and assisted James Copland in editing the London Medical Repository. In 1828 he moved again to take up a position as Professor of the Nature and Treatment of Disease at the newly established Univesrity of London and in 1830 published the book An Inquiry into the Indications of Insanity. His book challenged the emerging orthodoxy by arguing that asylum treatment was actively harmful in most instances, and where unavaoidable should be provided only in publicly funded institutions. Due to financial hardship he moved himself and his family again, this time to Warwick, where he joined the new Provincial Medical and Surgical Association (later the British Medical Association) and co-edited the Cyclopaedia of Practical Medicine with John Forbes.

In 1839 he was appointed as superintendant of the Hanwell County Asylum in Middlesex and became the focus of national and international attention, following his announcement that in his asylum all forms of mechanical restraint had been destroyed and replaced by a purely moral suasion and discipline. His new system was initially controversial but his asylum soon became widely regarded as a splendid advertisement for lunacy reform and Conolly was hailed as the head of the newly emerging group of experts in the treatment of the mad. He was elected a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1844 and also subsequently received the honorary DCL from Oxford University. However, the concept of non-restraint was not actually Conolly's innnovation as the approach had been pioneered by an obscure house surgeon, Robert Gardiner Hill, in 1838. Conolly had greatly admired this system and put it forward as his own, much to Hill's fury. Despite his success, Conolly continued to experience financial hardship and when his responsibilities were restricted at Hanwell in 1844 he resigned. In 1852 he was working in private practice, resorting to the very practice of trading in luncay which he had previously rallied against. By 1859 his asylum practice had become the ruling othodoxy and his standing as the doyen of alientists was recognised when he was elected (for the second time) as president of the Association of Medical Officers of Asylums and Hospitals for the Insane. He died on 4 March 1866 following a massive stroke.