Haslam of "Bedlam", Kitchiner of the "Oracles": two doctors under mad King George III, and their friendship.

IN the medical pantheon, section of psychiatry, John Haslam (1764-1844) occupies only a small niche. He is represented there under two headings: one flattering, the other discreditable. As a forerunner of attempts to correlate brain pathology with mental disease general paresis of the insane, or paralytic dementia, in particular he qualifies as a minor hero; as a callous practitioner of the institutional care for mental patients he emerges as a chastized minor villain. He has more recently been hailed as the first psychiatrist to recognize not only the simple dementing form of schizophrenia before Morel named it demence precoce (1850) and to describe the attendant feature of autism, but also to draw attention to obsessional neurosis and the cyclic nature of mania and melancholia.' Leigh's Historical development of British psychiatry allots to Haslam one-fifth of the first volume.2 Failing to meet the emerging humanitarian standards of asylum reform, Haslam was, in 1816, at the age of fifty-two, dismissed from his post. Titled Apothecary, he had for twenty years assumed the duties of an assistant physician at the Royal Bethlem Hospital, the proverbial over five centuries-old lunatic asylum near London. Again, as to the bright side of his reputation, "the respectable testimony of Mr Haslam" was acclaimed by such a prominent contemporary physician as Thomas Beddoes; above all he was quoted by Pinel often and with respect.3 But when he died, eighty years old, his most fulsome obituary appeared, not in the Lancet where he received a few cold lines,4 but, surprisingly, in the London Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, etc.5 In part, it was copied by such divergent sources as the fashionable Gentleman's Magazine, also of London, on the one hand, the sober American Journal ofInsanity,' on the other. After giving his degrees such as they were some acquired in middle age, i.e. following his dismissal from Bethlem