Robert Gardiner Hill

[1] He is normally credited with being the first superintendent of a small asylum (approximately 100 patients) to develop a mode of treatment in which reliance on mechanical medical restraint and coercion could be dropped altogether.

[3] On passing as a surgeon Hill went into practice at Lincoln, and in the same year obtained the appointment of house-surgeon to the General Dispensary there.

[7] This Conolly did in the month before taking up his appointment at Hanwell, where it is recorded in the visitors' book that he admired Hill's system.

He entered into partnership with Richard Sutton Harvey in 1840, and became proprietor of Eastgate House private asylum, Lincoln.

He died of apoplexy at Earl's Court House, London, on 30 May 1878, and was buried on the western side of Highgate cemetery (plot no.22660).

[3] The grave is on the right-hand side of the main path almost opposite the tall Gothic Mears family monument.

Hill published:[3] He also wrote articles "On Total Abolition of Personal Restraint in Treatment of the Insane" in The Lancet, 11 April 1840, p. 93, and 22 February 1851, pp.

[3] Hill's priority claim on non-restraint was put forward in The Lancet in 1850, in response to Charlesworth and Conolly.

Sir James Clark, 1st Baronet wrote a Memoir of John Conolly that appeared in 1869, and Hill contributed further to the debate in 1870, in Lunacy.

This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain: Augustus Bozzi Granville (1841), The Spas of England; Henry Colburn, London.