Dead End: The Lives Of Henry Cotton

by Gilbert Honigfeld

In the mid-1920s, the Director of Trenton Psychiatric Hospital, Dr. Henry Cotton, was called before a New Jersey legislative commission to defend his controversial approach to treating the mentally ill. Among the best-known physicians of his day, Dr. Cotton had for about ten years been engaged in a kind of 'psychosurgery' in which teeth, tonsils, colons and accessible elements of the genito-urinary systems were surgically removed in an attempt to cure mental illness. In the five fictive lectures comprising the core of this book, Princeton University's Dr. Joseph Raycroft in 1948 reflects on an era that ended 20 years earlier in a discredited theory and a disgraced practitioner. A long-suppressed investigative report prepared by Dr. Phyllis Greenacre under the direction of Dr. Adolf Meyer is included verbatim as an appendix to this volume.

194 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009