William Battie

William Battie (sometimes spelt Battycite web|url=http://www.twickenham-museum.org.uk/detail.asp?ContentID=271 |title=Dr William Battie |publisher=The Twickenham Museum |accessdate=2008-01-08)] ), 1 September 1703 or 1704 [cite web |url=http://www.rcplondon.ac.uk/heritage/munksroll/munk_details.asp?ID=297 |title=Battie, William |publisher=Royal College of Physicians |work=Munk's Roll |accessdate=2008-01-08] –13 June 1776, was an English physician who published in 1758 the first lengthy book on the treatment of mental illness, "A Treatise on Madness", and by extending methods of treatment to the poor as well as the affluent, helped raise psychiatry to a respectable specialty. He was the first and only psychiatrist to become President of the Royal College of Physicians.

He was born in 1704, the son of a vicar, Reverend Edward Battie, in Modbury. He studied at Eton and King's College, Cambridge. Being unable to afford a legal training he "diverted his attention to physic" and practised for a short time in Cambridge. After practising for many years in the field of psychiatry in London, he acquired two private "madhouses" near St. Luke's, from which he gained a handsome income. His appointment as physician at St. Luke's gave him a firm base upon which to consolidate his reputation.

He died following a stroke in 1776 and was buried alongside his wife in Kingston, Surrey. His great great grandson currently plays football for the Adelaide Football club in the Australian football league.

Psychiatric work

Shortly after commencing at St Luke's, Battie restarted discussion on the management of mental disorder in his Treatise onMadness (1785). It was in large part a critique aimed particularly at the hospital of Bedlam, where a conservative regime continued to use routinely coercive and barbaric custodial treatment, with crowded cells and jeering visitors. Battie instead argued for a tailored management of patients entailing cleanliness, good food, fresh air, and distraction from friends and family. He offered some arguments, based on the work of Locke, that insanity could result from the wrong joining together of ideas rather than simply uncontrolled and disturbed animal passions. However his main theme was that mental disorder originated from dysfunction of the material brain and body rather than the internal workings of the mind and he proposed somatic treatments in keeping with his times, which he classified as involving either "depletion", "revulsion", "removal" or "expulsion". It was not until the York Retreat in 1796 that a radically more humane psychosocial approach was implemented in England. [Laffey, P. (2003) [http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=179425 Psychiatric therapy in Georgian Britain] Psychological Medicine, 2003, 33, 1285–1297. DOI 10.1017/S0033291703008109]

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