William Sargant 1907-88
<p><a href="http://pb.rcpsych.org/content/pbrcpsych/11/9/290.full.pdf">http://pb.rcpsych.org/content/pbrcpsych/11/9/290.full.pdf</a></p>
<p>Spent a year at Harvard 1938 under Stanley Cobb</p>
<p>Co author with Golla - Electric convulsion therapy of schizophrenia</p>
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<p>Dr Sargant must have been a particularly charismatic man. In 1938 whilst at The Maudsley he won a scholarship to Harvard Medical School in Boston and whilst travelling to the United States by boat fell in with a crowd that included Eleanor Roosevelt 2nd who was the favourite niece of the First Lady, and Patricia Coolidge who was related to a past President. He was invited to a White House dinner and seated “one away” from the President himself.</p>
<p>Another meeting that Dr Sargant had whilst in America proved to be the undoing of a great many of the patients that he treated when back in London. A Portuguese neurologist, Dr Egas Moniz had begun to operate on the frontal lobes of psychiatric patients and claimed that he was curing them. Two American psychiatrists Dr Walter Freeman and Dr Watts had started to use Moniz methods on their own patients and were enthusiastic about the results. </p>
<p>Dr Sargant asked to interview three of these American patients.He gives an account of these examinations in his 1967 book “The Unquiet Mind”. To a lay person, the results of Freeman and Watts assaults on their patient’s brains don’t suggest a curative process. </p>
<p>Dr Sargant admits “True, the first operations were sometimes followed by a marked deterioration of the patients personality, and the next tactical move was to overcome these effects by modifying the surgical technique while still relieving obsessive anxiety”. </p>
<p>It should be remembered that Dr Sargant’s experiments involved hacking into people’s brains but this remark is typical of Dr Sargant who was no respecter of the human brain or mind.
Sargant’s ready acceptance in the the highest American social circles may explain the links that he was believed to have had with the CIA.</p>
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