Edward Mapother and the Making of the Maudsley Hospital

Extract

I am particularly grateful for the privilege of delivering the first Mapother Lecture. I believe it will be appropriate to devote it to a review of Professor Mapother's life and his work in shaping the Maudsley Hospital, with which he is inseparably connected. It is nearly thirty years since his death. The course of events since then has shown on what sure foundations he built. Those like myself who had daily contact with him during the later years of his life felt great respect and admiration, as well as warm affection, for him; but it is only in the perspective of recent history that the full measure of his achievement can be seen: perhaps not even yet. In preparing this Address I have been mindful of what Sir James Crichton-Browne said when delivering the first Maudsley Lecture in 1920—‘the last thing the donor of this Lectureship, retiring and shy of publicity as he was, would have wished would be that its inaugural discourse should be devoted to any elaborate eulogy of himself.’ It is an éloge rather than a Eulogy that I would wish to put before you this evening; Condorcet, a master of the art of obituary appraisal, said that an academic éloge should not be a panegyric but an effort to report the truth about a scholar and to do him full justice.