Henry Cotton (doctor), Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetHenry Cotton (doctor)
American psychiatrist
Date of Birth: 18-May-1876
Place of Birth: Norfolk, Virginia, United States
Date of Death: 08-May-1933
Profession: psychiatrist
Nationality: United States
Zodiac Sign: Taurus 
About Henry Cotton (doctor)
- Henry Andrews Cotton (18 May 1876 – 8 May 1933) was an American psychiatrist and the medical director of New Jersey State Hospital at Trenton (now the Trenton Psychiatric Hospital, previously the New Jersey State Lunatic Asylum) in Trenton, New Jersey from 1907 to 1930.
- He and his staff practiced experimental surgical bacteriology on patients, including the routine removal of some or all of patients' teeth, their tonsils, and frequently spleens, colons, ovaries, and other organs.
- These practices continued long after careful statistical reviews falsified Cotton's claims of extraordinarily high cure rates, and demonstrated very high mortality and morbidity as a result of these aggressive and dangerous measures.
- After becoming medical director of Trenton State Hospital at the age of 30, Cotton instituted many progressive ideas.
- These included abolishing mechanical restraints and implementing meetings of daily staff to thrash out patient care.His enthusiasm for the scientific medicine that was taking hold at the opening of the 20th century led him to an unshakable belief that mental illness of all kinds was the result of untreated infections in the body.
- Based on the observation that patients with high fever often turn delusional or begin hallucinating, Meyer introduced the possibility of mental illness (then viewed as the cutting edge concept of scientific medicine) being a biological cause of behavioral abnormalities, in contrast to eugenic theories which emphasized heredity and to Freud's theories of childhood traumas.
- Cotton would become the leading practitioner of the new approach in the United States.
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