William Sargant - Early Life and Medical Career

Early Life and Medical Career

Sargant was born into a large and wealthy Methodist family in Highgate, London. His father was a City broker, his mother, Alice Walters, was the daughter of a Methodist minister from a family of wealthy Welsh brewers. Five of his uncles were preachers. He had two brothers—human rights campaigner Thomas Sargant and bishop of Mysore Norman Sargant, and five sisters. Sargant went to the Leys School in Cambridge and then studied medicine at St John's College, Cambridge. He did not excel academically but played rugby for St John's College, was president of Cambridge University Medical Society and collected autographs of famous medical men. Sargant obtained a rugby scholarship to complete his medical education at St Mary's Hospital. His father lost most of his money in the depression in the late 1920s and the scholarship allowed Sargant to continue his medical education. After qualifying as a doctor he worked as a house-surgeon and house-physician at St Mary's and looked set for a successful career as a physician. But in 1934—four years after qualifying as a doctor—a nervous breakdown and spell in a mental hospital put paid to his plans. Sargant would later attribute this period of depression to undiagnosed tuberculosis, although research which he conducted on the use of iron, in very high doses, for the treatment of pernicious anaemia was not well received and this disappointment may have contributed to his breakdown.

On his recovery, Sargant worked as a locum at Hanwell Hospital, and then for a while helped his brother-in-law at his Nottingham general practice, before deciding on a career in psychiatry. In 1935 he was offered a post by Edward Mapother at the Maudsley Hospital. In his autobiography Sargant describes how Mapother’s views coincided with his own: 'the future of psychiatric treatment lay in the discovery of simple physiological treatments which could be as widely applied as in general medicine'. Soon after he arrived at the Maudsley, Sargant was involved in testing amphetamine as a new treatment for depression and took it himself while studying for the diploma in psychological medicine. Sargant would take a variety of drugs to treat his depression throughout his life. Another treatment introduced at the Maudsley while Sargant was there was insulin shock therapy.

In 1938 Sargant was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship to spend a year at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, under Professor Stanley Cobb. Whilst there he did some experiments on over-breathing and developed a theory that the difference between normal and neurotic people is that the latter have lost their suggestibility. On a visit to Washington he arranged to meet Walter Freeman and see three of his patients who had undergone psychosurgical operations. Although the results were not altogether successful, Sargant resolved to introduce the operation into Britain.