Henry Cotton - Surgeon Psychiatrist | Asylum Horror Stories | Mental Health History Documentary

The incredible but true history of a promising young doctor who was given too much power and who abused that power to literally, carve people up.

Henry Cotton was born in 1876 – he showed great promise and studied with some of the most important figures in world psychiatry in the early 1900s in the US and Germany.

At 30 years of age, he became medical director of the State Lunatic Asylum in Trenton, New Jersey and had absolute control over the lives of his 2000 patients and all of the staff.

He actually started well, instituting progressive ideas such as getting rid of mechanical restraints, but he soon became obsessed with trying to cure mental illness by surgically excising pockets of infection. He and his staff operated on thousands of patients – many of whom died from the major surgery he inflicted on them, yet he claimed an 85% cure rate.

He went on for years despite complaints and investigations. Was he mad? I set out the case for him actually having a narcissistic personality disorder.

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Academic References:
Scull, A. (2005). Madhouse: A tragic tale of megalomania and modern medicine. Yale University Press.
Bouchard, C. (1896). Traité de pathologie générale. Masson. Paris
Cotton, H. A. (1921). The defective, delinquent, and insane: The relation of focal infections to their causation, treatment, and prevention. Princeton University Press.
Cotton, H. A. (1923). The relation of chronic sepsis to the so-called functional mental disorders. Journal of Mental Science, 69(287), 434-465.
Davidson, J. (2016). Bayard Holmes (1852–1924) and Henry Cotton (1869–1933): Surgeon–psychiatrists and their tragic quest to cure schizophrenia. Journal of Medical Biography, 24(4), 550-559.
Kopeloff, N., & Kirby, G. H. (1923). Focal infection and mental disease. American Journal of Psychiatry, 80(2), 149-197.
Meyer, A. (1934). Henry A. Cotton. American Journal of Psychiatry, 90(4), 921-923.
Sheth, N., & Imbroglia, G. (1999). Images in Psychiatry. Am J Psychiatry, 156(12).
Wessely, S. (2009). Surgery for the treatment of psychiatric illness: the need to test untested theories. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 102(10), 445-451.

Copyright Disclaimer
The primary purpose of this video is educational. I have tried to use material in the public domain or with Creative Commons Non-attribution licences wherever possible. Where attribution is required, I have listed this below. I believe that any copyright material used falls under the remit of Fair Use, but if any content owners would like to dispute this, I will not hesitate to immediately remove that content. It is not my intention to infringe on content ownership in any way. If you happen to find your art or images in the video, please let me know and I will be glad to credit you.

Images
Wikimedia Commons
Wellcome Collection
Byron Jennings as Dr Cotton in Boardwalk Empire Season 5
John Hodgman as Dr Cotton in the Cinemax drama The Knick
Snub Pollard in Alfred Goulding’s The Dippy Dentist (1920) Public domain via Internet Archive
NJ History.com
Science Museum
Public Domain or used on Fair Use basis for education purpose

Video produced by Professor Graeme Yorston and Tom Yorston.