William Llywelyn Parry-Jones

William Parry-Jones, who died in July at the age of sixty-two, was Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Glasgow and Honorary Consultant to both the Greater Glasgow Mental Health Services Trust and the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, Yorkhill. A most distinguished clinician and teacher, Parry-Jones was also a productive and influential historian of psychiatry. His interest in the history of psychiatry began while he was a medical student at Cambridge University. When he suggested a historical subject for his MD thesis he was severely discouraged from this unorthodox line of research. Nevertheless he persevered. The quality of the resulting work, The English provincial madhouse and insanity, was such that it won him the Noble Prize (he often joked that the last two letters should have been transposed) for the best MD thesis of the year. He was shortly elected, at an unusually early age, a Fellow of Linacre College. The research for the MD formed the basis for the publication, in 1972, of his major historical work, The trade in lunacy: a study of private madhouses in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the early nineteen-seventies the history of psychiatry was not the fashionable subject it is now, and the social history of psychiatry was still in its infancy. The trade in lunacy made a very significant contribution indeed to the development of the new field. Before publication of The trade in lunacy very little was known of the private madhouse and its role in the care of the insane. Parry-Jones' meticulous research revealed that private, for-profit institutions had been the major source of care and shelter for lunatics and idiots, especially pauper ones, throughout the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth centuries. Earlier accounts of the private madhouse had tended to perpetuate a very negative image of the institution, coloured both by eighteenth-century scandals of unwarranted detention and inappropriate twentieth-century sensitivities. Parry-Jones presented a more balanced view-despite many shortcomings and some flagrant abuse, the care provided by the private madhouse was in general humane, if judged by contemporary attitudes towards insanity or social conditions in general. Another service that The trade in lunacy did for the historiography of psychiatry was to highlight the amount of archival material that was available for the study of institutional care in Britain, and to emphasize the absolute necessity for would-be historians of the subject to engage with that material. In 1972, Parry-Jones was appointed Director of the Department of Adolescent Psychiatry at the Wameford Hospital in Oxford. It was not long before the excellence of that Department was nationally recognized. In 1987, he was elevated to the Chair of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Glasgow. Not only did he run a large clinical and teaching department, he played a major role, both as an advisor to the Scottish Office and through the Royal College of Psychiatrists, in the development of child and adolescent mental health services throughout the United Kingdom. He became recognized as an expert on