Eliot Slater - Post-war Years

Post-war Years

Eliot Slater’s first marriage was dissolved in 1946 and he married Jean Fyfe Foster in the same year. Also in 1946, he was appointed Physician in psychological medicine at the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases, Queen Square, London, where he worked for eighteen years. He resigned in 1964 in protest at the hospital’s rejection of the offer of a benefaction from the Mental Health Research Fund to establish a chair in psychiatry, writing in his resignation letter that the collective views of his colleagues had “…turned increasingly counter to everything for which I have stood”, and that they had failed to appreciate the need for academic research in psychiatry. In 1949 he was appointed a member of the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment (1949-1953). He was strongly opposed to capital punishment, not only as a barbarity, but also because statistical studies indicated that it was ineffective. He was delighted when capital punishment was finally abolished in 1969. Meanwhile he continued his own research as Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, notably on the prevalence of psychiatric disorders in twins (with James Shields). In 1959 he founded the Medical Research Council Psychiatric Genetics Unit at the Maudsley, which he directed until 1969. His work here culminated in The Genetics of Mental Disorders (with Valerie Cowie, 1971).

Among his numerous other publications, one to be singled out is Clinical Psychiatry (with Willi Mayer-Gross and Martin Roth, 1954), which became a standard textbook for doctors and students, and remained so for many years (third edition 1969 by Slater and Roth; revised 1977). He gave the Litchfield (1959), Galton (1960) and Mapother (1960) lectures. In his Maudsley (1961) lecture and later writings he questioned the concept of ‘hysteria’ as a valid diagnosis, showing that serious physical illness subsequently emerged in many patients initially labelled ‘hysterical’ and that the physical illness could often account for their allegedly psychological symptoms. He was Editor of the British Journal of Psychiatry from 1961 to 1972, and transformed it into a leading European journal. In 1966 he was appointed C.B.E. He held honorary fellowships of several British, German and American medical and psychiatric societies, as well as of his Cambridge college, St. John’s, and received an honorary degree from the University of Dundee in 1971.

He died at his home in Barnes, London, on 15 May 1983, being survived by his first and second wives and by the four children of his first marriage - a mathematician, a haematologist, a psychiatrist and an English don.