Henry Cotton Biography

Before returning to the United States, in order to take office at the age of 30, Cotton studied psychiatry in Europe under the guidance of two legendary figures of that time - Emil Greelin and Alois Alzheimer. He was also a student of Dr. Adolf Meyer Dr. Adolf Meyer from the medical school of John Hopkins. All these people were pillars in the field of psychiatry, especially Meyer, who was one of the first to admit that the brain is most likely to blame for psychiatric problems.

Meyer also admitted that human activity and mental health are interconnected, and he considered changes in the everyday life of a person, the environment and habits as part of treatment.

Despite their revolutionary ideas, which so firmly entered the modern psychiatric theory and practice, Meyer also adhered to the idea that mental illness can be caused by a bacterial infection, based on observation, that patients with high temperature are often crazy or begin to hallucinate. Henry Cotton was fascinated by the idea that microbes are the root of all mental illness.

In the year, when the reports were confirmed that the bacteria that caused syphilis caused patients in the brain, which in the most serious cases led to mental symptoms and dementia, Cotton cheered up. Soon after, he began to apply his theories in relation to Trenton’s state hospital. Prior to the invention of penicillin there were ten more years, and the only way to eliminate the infection was the surgical removal of the infected organ.

A shelter for crazy in New Jersey, Trenton. At first, Cotton took up his teeth and slowly began to make his way to other organs. The mouth, he reasoned, was the most obvious place where microbes were hidden. Thus, he began with the removal of teeth, affected by stone or decay. He even pulled out his teeth, and also removed his teeth to his wife and two sons as a preventive measure in order to avoid the risk of infection.

When the teeth of his teeth did not cure his patients, he doubled his efforts and removed the tonsils to them. If this was not achieved by healing, suspicion fell on other organs. Soon, patients lost their spleen, colon, testicles, ovaries, gall bladder and other organs. Of the patients operated on the cotton, every third died. Cotton explained mortality with a poor physical condition of patients due to chronic psychosis.

Among those who survived, as Cotton claimed, the recovery indicator reaches 85 percent, and this statistics brought him a high assessment of the scientific community. Desperately in need of help, many rich people who suffer from mental illness flowed into Trenton in search of the wonderful medicines of Cotton. Meanwhile, at the Johns Hopkins medical school, Dr. Adolf Meyer instructed the new employee Phillis Greenaro Phyllis Greenacre to study the work of Cotton in the hope of getting a brilliant report on the work of a former student.

At that moment, when Greenacr entered Trenton, he had a bad feeling. The institution had a “fetid smell so characteristic of psychiatric hospitals,” he wrote in his report. And Cotton himself, as he discovered, was "unusually peculiar." Greenacra surprised the behavior of patients - they went lowering their heads, and their speech was slurred, because all their teeth were removed.

Greenacr discovered that the entries in hospital books were chaotic, and the numbers that Cotton so often used as an illustration of his methods did not fully develop. Greenacr found that very few patients actually recovered, and their recovery was not related to operations; And what died significantly more patients than Cotton recognized - almost half. Unfortunately, the months of labor, which Greenark spent on an investigation, did not lead to anything.

When Adolf Meyer read Greenacra's report, he was shocked and, trying to keep Cotton’s career, refused to publish these results. Cotton left the state hospital and opened his own private clinic in Trenton, where he continued to kill his patients. By the time he died of a sudden heart attack on May 8, he killed hundreds of people. Meyer wrote a flattering necrologist about his death, despite the fact that Kotton was responsible for the death of an innumerable number of patients.

The sons of Cotton also fell victims of the crazy doctor - they both committed suicide in adulthood. Previous news.