Maudsley, Henry

Born Feb. 5, 1835, near Settle, Yorkshire; died Jan. 23 (or 24), 1918, in Bushy Heath, Hertfordshire. English psychiatrist and philosopher.

In 1857, Maudsley graduated from the University of London. He became a member of the Royal Medical Society in 1869. From 1869 to 1879 he was a professor at the University of London; he later worked in psychiatric hospitals, including the one in London that he founded. Maudsley was the founder of the evolutionary school of psychiatry; he was a follower of C. Darwin, who highly valued Maudsley’s book Physiology and Pathology of Mind (1867; Russian translation, 1871).

Maudsley laid the foundations of child psychiatry in Great Britain and made a substantial contribution to the development of legal psychiatry. In his philosophical views, Maudsley was a positivist. He upheld the theory of psychophysiological parallelism and applied the laws of biological evolution to the study of the social and historical development of man. Maudsley defended colonialism and considered wars beneficial to mankind.