Frederic Golla

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In a book written by a subsequent director of the Burden Institute, Ronald Hargreaves says the following about Golla:

Frederick Lucien Golla trained in neurology at Queen’s Square and pursued a conventional career until the First World War. He saw action in France and became intrigued by ‘shell shock’, believing he could predict who in his company would break down. Serving on War Office committees, he met Sir Frederick Mott an authority on ‘battle neurosis’. After the war he undertook a series of experiments, at the Maudsley’s Central Pathology Laboratory (directed by Mott) looking for physiological markers of vulnerability to neurosis. He flitted from one technique to another but the work was innovative, Mott was impressed and in 1921 Golla was invited to give the prestigious Croonian Lectures, his title: ‘The objective study of neurosis’. When Mott retired in 1924 Golla was appointed his successor and later made Professor of Mental Pathology at London University. In 1938 he was appointed Director of the new Burden Neurological Clinic, in Bristol. Funded by a charitable trust, ‘The Burden’ included wards, an operating theatre and laboratories, and became a leading research centre at the interface between neurology, psychiatry and psychology. Golla was its director until 1959. (Source: Ray Cooper and Jonathan Bird, The Burden: Fifty years of clinical and experimental neuroscience at the Burden Neurological Institute, White Tree Books, 1989)