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LOMAX, Montagu.
The Experiences of an Asylum Doctor.
With Suggestions for Asylum and Lunacy Law Reform. [Together with;] GRANT-SMITH, Rachel. The Experiences of an Asylum Patient. With an Introduction and Notes by Montagu Lomax.
Publisher: London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1921 & 1922
Stock code: 39426
Price: £425 Currency Conversion
First Editions. "Deficiencies in the day-to-day management of English asylums had long been exposed, ever since the damning indictment of neglect and casual cruelty contained in Montagu Lomax's The Experiences of an Asylum Doctor... a sobering work written not by a protesting patient, but by a disillusioned doctor. "Our asylums detain", he complained, "but they certainly do not cure."" [Porter Madness pp.207-8] After two years working at the Prestwich Asylum, the largest in the country, Lomax felt sufficiently disturbed to publish a description of his experiences and conditions and a plea for asylum reform. Following the publication The Ministry of Health convened the Cobb Committee to enquire into the accuracy of his charges. Lomax was called to appear before the committee, but declined due to his feeling that "owing to its official constitution, it was not only likely to be biased, but from its limited "terms of reference" it was unable to go to the root of the evils exposed in the book." The conclusions were, as he had expected, foregone, his allegations were rejected, & the committee congratulated on its "masterly and logical" report. Much was done to disparage Lomax's motives and reputation, and to marginalise him within the profession, sniped at in the Journal of Mental Sciences, and on his death in 1934 neither the JMS or British Medical Journal obituarised him. Having encountered Grant-Smith's narrative of her experiences "in the five asylums in which she was immured" as a series of articles in Truth he arranged for their republication in support of his own examination of the problem. She was "one of the witnesses whom I was, and I am, prepared to call before a [suitably constituted] Royal Commission, and let her tell her story in her own words." Lomax's exposés resulted directly in just such a commission, the Macmillan Commission of 1924, his evidence constituting 26pp in the Minutes of Evidence thereof, the recommendations of which led to the Mental Health Act of 1930, "opening the way to many developments in mental health services over the following 30 years." A recent study of the case from primary sources, where available, concluded, "Lomax did more than contribute to a process of mental health reform. His willingness to write frankly and to criticise provide an example to all mental health professionals who find themselves in settings where abuses occur... His vivid descriptions of patients' behaviour and mental state in asylums and of the institutional process produced insights which were to be rediscovered 30 years later by Barton and Goffman..." [Harding "Not Worth Powder and Shot" British Journal of Psychiatry, (1990) 156, p.187] This pair of titles are not uncommon institutionally, but really quite elusive on the market.
2 vols. Octavo. Original brown and black cloth respectively. Some browning to both, the second item from the Daily Express library with their inkstamps to the endpapers and edges, some slight damping to the inner lower corner of the endpapers of the first, in both cases the cloth a little worn, but nonetheless very good.
