John Haslam (physician)

After acting for many years as apothecary to Bethlehem Hospital, London, and obtaining a practical knowledge of nervous diseases, Haslam was dismissed by the governors in 1816 after the publication of the Report of the Select Committee on Madhouses.

[1] Haslam was distinguished in private practice by his clinical sensitivity, while his scientific publications and contributions to periodicals gave him a solid professional reputation.

In an 1809 edition of a work on insanity he included a detailed description of the case of James Tilly Matthews which is one of the earliest and clearest recordings of paranoid schizophrenia.

[2] However, in the early years of the nineteenth century, Bethlehem Hospital came to be compared unfavourably with the reformed asylums, notably with The Retreat in York, and with St Luke's under William Battie and his successors.

This shift of fashionable opinion reached a decisive conclusion with the Norris scandal of 1815/1816, and Haslam (and, to a lesser extent, Thomas Monro) attracted much of the popular and political obloquy, voiced especially by Edward Wakefield, a Quaker land agent and leading advocate of asylum reform.