Description
In the early 1950s David Clark, then a Senior Registrar at Maudsley Hospital, astonished his contemporaries by moving, at one bound, to the post of Medical Superintendent at Fulbourn Hospital, Cambridge. He was, in fact, unusually well qualified for this accelerated promotion on two counts. Firstly, he had had several years’ varied medical experience during the War, including active service with the Parachute Regiment during the final battles on German soil, and a parachute descent in mid-Sumatra in order to extricate Dutch citizens from a Japanese internment camp; and, secondly, before going to Maudsley Hospital he had served an apprenticeship in hospital psychiatry under Sir David Henderson at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital. The surprising thing about his appointment was not his youthfulness—after all, Henry Maudsley was appointed Superintendent of Cheadle Royal Hospital at the age of twenty-three—but his choice of this particular career, at a time when mental hospitals were held in low esteem, and the very existence of the post of Medical Superintendent was being challenged.
Dr Clark has never been one to be deterred by a challenging prospect; but he had very positive reasons for electing this particular field of action. Already, as a trainee psychiatrist, he had been intrigued by the possibility of putting to practical use some of the new insights emerging from the study of social interactions—both on the small scale of individual and group psychotherapy, and on the larger scale of community organization and ‘man-management’. He had read eagerly the earliest sociological studies of mental hospitals, and of the ‘micro-societies’ of single psychiatric wards; and he was an admiring, though not uncritical, frequenter of Maxwell Jones’s ‘therapeutic community’ at what came to be known as the Henderson Hospital.