William Battie

After practising for many years in the field of psychiatry in London, he acquired two private "madhouses" near St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics, from which he gained a handsome income.

It was in large part a critique aimed particularly at the Bethlem Hospital, where a conservative regime continued to use routinely coercive and barbaric custodial treatment, with crowded cells and jeering visitors.

He offered some arguments, based on the work of Locke, that insanity could result from the wrong joining together of ideas rather than simply uncontrolled and disturbed animal passions.

However his main theme was that mental disorder originated from dysfunction of the material brain and body rather than the internal workings of the mind and he proposed somatic treatments in keeping with his times, which he classified as involving either "depletion", "revulsion", "removal" or "expulsion".

[6] Battie insisted that psychiatric disorders were curable: "Madness is ... as manageable as many other distempers, which are equally dreadful and obstinate, and yet are not looked upon as incurable; such unhappy objects ought by no means to be abandoned, much less shut up in loathsome prisons as criminals or nuisances to society".