Richard Hale (physician)

He entered Trinity College, Oxford, with his younger brother, Henry, in June 1689, where Thomas Sykes was his tutor.

[2] Mentored by Edward Tyson, Hale succeeded him as physician to the Bridewell and Bethlehem Hospitals (Bedlam) in 1708.

As a clinician he was influenced by iatromechanics; his reputation, after his death, was for mild treatment of mental illness, for example by sedation, rather than physical restraints.

[3] At the end of his life, as a private psychiatric patient, Hale attended Frances, wife of John Erskine, Earl of Mar, by that time a Jacobite exile in Paris.

Frances, daughter of Evelyn Pierrepont, 1st Duke of Kingston-upon-Hull, and sister of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu who cared for her in England and brought in Hale, is now considered to have been suffering from clinical depression.

Hale's judgement that Lady Mar was insane was later reversed, after his death, by Richard Mead.