The Late Dr Conolly, Resident Physician of Hanwell Lunatic Asylum (undated). Portrait by Messrs. Maull and Co. of Piccadilly and Cheapside. Picture selection and text by Dr Elizabeth Tovey, Central and North West London Mental Health Trust, and Dr Hagen Rampes, Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust.

John Conolly (1794–1866) was responsible for abolishing the use of restraint in the treatment of pauper patients at Hanwell Lunatic Asylum in the 1830s. He took the idea from Robert Gardiner Hill, a little-known house surgeon from Lincoln. John Conolly's initial lack of success as both a clinician and a lecturer did not deter him and he secured a job as resident physician at Hanwell, a post that had previously eluded him. In his earlier work he advocated community care and used the term ‘restraint’ in its broader sense of both the use of mechanical constraints and the removal of patients from ordinary social life to confinement in an institution. He held that admission should only occur after a careful examination of the patient by a clinician with expertise in lunacy and that the asylum should be a place in which medical men were taught to recognise and treat mental disorder. Conolly's achievements at Hanwell increased his reputation and he was eventually elected to the Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians in 1844. In 1856 he wrote The Treatment of the Insane without Mechanical Restraints, which advocated ‘occupations’ in the daytime, ‘evening entertainments’ and treating patients with ‘kindness’. Hunter and Macalpine (Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1963) judged Conolly one of the ‘outstanding figures’ in the history of psychiatry, although Andrew Scull (New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004) has provided a more skeptical view.

Thanks to Ealing Local History Centre, Ealing Central Library, 103 Ealing Broadway, London W5 5JY.