Many objects of philanthropy had Dr. Conolly’s untiring advocacy, both before and after his retirement from Hanwell. Public middle-class lunatic asylums, the education of medical men in mental diseases, the establishment of idiot asylums, especially that at Earlswood, were among these. He was the first doctor applied to by Mrs. Plumbe in regard to the foundation of Earlswood, and his co-operation with Dr. Andrew Reed was of the most essential service to the enterprise.
Dr. Langdon Down, formerly Medical Superintendent at Earlswood, wrote in regard to Conolly: “His visits were the most refreshing incident of my recollection in connection with the asylum. Entering on my work (in 1858) as an untried man, and finding myself allied to an institution which had become unpopular at the Lunacy Board, I was mainly decided on holding a position which had so much to overwhelm one by the influence of Dr. Conolly. That influence was magical. The humility of his character was only equalled by the real love he manifested for the mentally afflicted.
“At the visits of the Board of Management, he would steal away from his colleagues, and was to be found holding loving intercourse with the little members of my charge in a way that one has never seen before or since. Moreover, he so encouraged every official in his or her work, that the savour of his visit lasted till he again returned.... For myself, I have often had to seek his counsel, and never without being struck with his judgment and the fascination of his influence, the high resolve he inspired in one, and what willingness he exhibited to maintain, co-equally with the responsibility, the power of the Medical Superintendent, and thus to prevent a repetition of those evils which he had so bitterly to lament in his own experience.”
The years after Conolly left Hanwell were busily occupied with a large practice, especially in mental cases. In a few years his unceasing labour told on him, and he suffered much from chronic rheumatism and neuralgia. Finally he was compelled to retire from practice, when he took up his residence at Lawn House, Hanwell, whence he could see the asylum in which he had spent so many anxious hours. He finally lost mental energy, and was unable to complete several treatises and records of experience which he was contemplating. He, however, left an enduring memorial of his life-work in “The Treatment of the Insane without Mechanical Restraints,” 1856, written in a most readable style. We must not omit to mention his courses of lectures on Insanity at the College of Physicians and at the Royal Institution, his papers on Infantile Insanity, and finally “A Study of Hamlet,” in which he brings the most skilfully marshalled arguments to prove that Hamlet’s was a real and not a feigned madness. As to Hamlet’s treatment of Ophelia in Act II., Scene 1, and more especially in the scene where Hamlet and Laertes met over her grave, he remarked; “The picture of madness here is too minutely true, its lights and shades are too close to nature to have been painted as a mere illustration of feigning, and of feigning without intelligible purpose.” Both Sir Theodore and Lady Martin (Miss Helen Faucit) considered his exposition most satisfactory, and that it settled the question finally.
Conolly was carried off, after years of weakness, by an attack of paralysis with convulsions, which was fatal in a few hours, on March 5, 1867. Few have left behind them a brighter record as physician and philanthropist.
Improvement in the treatment of the insane and the knowledge of mental diseases has progressed rapidly in late years, owing to the efforts and studies of many workers, among whom Drs. Bucknill, Tuke, Hood, Lockhart Robinson, and Forbes Winslow are conspicuous. The record of their work would lead us into too wide a field. But the life-work of one of the sons-in-law of Dr. Conolly, Henry Maudsley, is of a character which for good or ill has exerted, and is exerting, a powerful influence on younger minds. We come here into a region of work influenced by the philosophy of Darwin and Herbert Spencer, applied to the physiology and pathology of mind, and to the relationship between body and mind. The time is not yet come for an impartial estimate of the striking works which Dr. Maudsley has brought forth in fertile succession, in addition to his extensive labours as one of the editors of the Journal of Mental Science. But it is certain that every one who would place himself in a position to estimate the strength of the so-called “materialistic” school, whether he be a metaphysician, a doctor, or a person of average culture, must read Dr. Maudsley’s works. They are written fearlessly, and for the most part with admirable lucidity, displaying a knowledge of literature and philosophy not often met with, combined with great practical experience in mental phenomena.
Henry Maudsley was born near Giggleswick, in Yorkshire, on February 5, 1835. After receiving his early education at Giggleswick School, he proceeded to University College, London, and took the M.B. degree at London University in 1856, with the distinction of University Scholar in Medicine. He proceeded to the M.D. degree in 1857. During the years 1859-1862 he was Resident Physician to the Manchester Royal Lunatic Hospital. Returning later to London he became for a time Professor of Medical Jurisprudence at his old college, and later Consulting Physician to the West London Hospital.
In an article on “The Theory of Vitality,” which Dr. Maudsley published in the British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review in 1863 (republished in “Body and Mind,” 1870), he showed remarkable power for a young man of twenty-eight. His conclusion was that the conscious mind of man blends in unity of development with the unconscious life of nature. He looked for the harmonisation of the idealism of Plato and the realism of Bacon as the expressions of the same truths.
In 1867 Dr. Maudsley published an important work on the Physiology and Pathology of Mind. It was intended to treat of mental phenomena from a physiological rather than from a metaphysical point of view and secondly, to bring the manifold instructive instances presented by the unsound mind to bear upon the interpretation of the obscure problems of mental science, and to do what he could to put an end to the inauspicious divorce between the two branches of his subject. He energetically exposed the shortcomings of psychologists and metaphysicians, and naturally encountered severe criticism, and it may be allowed that some of his expressions were those of youthful enthusiasm rather than of matured wisdom. But the book had such merits, that a second edition was called for in the next year, and before long exhausted, after which the book was out of print for some years.