A compelling article in the Journal of Medical Biography
recounts the story of Bayard Holmes and Henry Cotton, two American "surgeon-psychiatrists" who believed that they could cure schizophrenia by removing parts of their patients' intestines (and other organs). What's more, both men tested their treatments on their own children - with tragic results. The article is by Jonathan Davidson of Duke University.
Holmes and Cotton had a theory to justify their extreme cures:
This was the idea that 'insanity' was actually a state of chronic intoxication, caused by some mind-altering substance or toxin produced inside the sufferer's own body. Proponents of the autointoxication theory didn't all agree on what this natural hallucinogen was, or on where it came from. Some held that the toxin was generated by the human body's own glands and organs, while others believed that it was produced by bacteria that had infected the host. Holmes ...
