Abstract
Maurice O’Connor Drury (1907–76), an Irish psychiatrist, is best known for his accounts of his close friendship with the eminent twentieth-century philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein. His only book, The Danger of Words (1973), was well received by those who had an interest in the relationship between psychiatry, psychology and philosophy. This article concentrates on Drury’s experiences, studies and writings in these fields.
Introduction
Con 1 Drury’s involvement in the relationship between philosophy and psychiatry was facilitated by the fact that, unlike most practitioners of medicine of his era in Britain, he did not undertake preparatory medical studies immediately after completing his secondary education. Born in Exeter, to Irish parents, and schooled there, he went up to Cambridge in the academic year 1926–7, with a view to taking the Moral Sciences Tripos. He had already attempted to read books on philosophy and hoped that by studying the subject he would be facilitated ‘to find in some book or some teacher a certainty as to the meaning of life and the way I should go’ (letter from Drury to Rush Rhees, May 1966). 2
Drury envisaged his undergraduate studies as a prelude to seminary training for ordination in the Church of England. At Cambridge he came under the tutelage of some notable philosophers of the day: G.E. Moore (champion of ‘common sense’ in face of the abstract perplexities engaging established idealist philosophers), C.D. Broad (a taxonomist of philosophical theories to none of which he could commit) and the logician, W.E. Johnson, who was, however, by that time very close to the end of his career. In the 1920s, Bertrand Russell was still influential on the Cambridge philosophy faculty – Moore and Johnson, in particular – (although Russell’s espousal of pacifism during the First World War had forced a departure from the University).
Wittgenstein
More significant for Drury’s quest than any of the above, was Ludwig Wittgenstein who arrived in Cambridge during Drury’s third year of study. Wittgenstein had left the University, where he had been Russell’s student, at the onset of war in 1914, to serve in the armed forces of his native land, Austria. Further to a plan conceived by Maynard Keynes, and carried out mainly by a young mathematician, Frank Ramsey, Wittgenstein had eventually agreed to return to Cambridge in 1929. His sponsors hoped he would develop the logical innovations Russell had worked on in the first decade of the twentieth century – although, as it turned out, Wittgenstein was to implement a different agenda.
Remarkably quickly, the 40-year-old Austrian and Drury developed a close personal relationship that lasted until Wittgenstein died in 1951, with Drury at his bedside. This relationship had at first the character of an older man opening up the world to a younger one, whom the senior regarded as narrowly educated. In time, Wittgenstein strongly opposed Drury’s aspiration to take clerical orders that would permit him to lead a congregation in the austere prayers of the Latin rite (as translated in the Anglican Prayer book). This plan was eventually displaced by medical studies, later capped by specialization in psychiatry. In a journal written up retrospectively, Drury related how this reorientation of his life came about while at the same time giving the most intimate literary portrait that exists of Wittgenstein. 3 A particular interest is in seeing how, as their friendship unfolded, Drury came to support Wittgenstein, a man prone to depression, 4 through one of the most disturbed and also creative periods of his life – in Ireland in 1947–9. By that time, Drury was practising as a psychiatrist in Dublin.
After Wittgenstein’s death, Drury continued to read philosophy and exchange letters about that subject and also religion with another former student who had become a close friend of Wittgenstein, Rush Rhees. Rhees was a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Swansea and one of three literary executors of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass. It was he who edited Drury’s memoirs of Wittgenstein. Drury also wrote papers which he shared with groups of colleagues on aspects of the practice of psychiatry. These papers, influenced by his exposure to Wittgenstein, were published in The Danger of Words (Drury, 1973), the last chapter of which attracted particular attention. This dealt with the implications that the physical treatments, which became available during Drury’s practice as a psychiatrist, had for the treatment of patients presenting with symptoms of a religious nature. Rhees regarded Drury as the best informed of the circle of Wittgenstein students on the views of their teacher on religion, and therefore well positioned to deal with this issue.
Drury’s background
As he later recalled, Drury had been brought up to a regime of daily family bible-reading led by his father, Henry D’Olier Drury (b. 1849). Henry was son of William Barker Drury, Registrar of the Court of Chancery of Ireland, the fifth born of 12 boys; he also had five sisters. The family had a city residence at 21 Harcourt Street, Dublin, and later also acquired a 48-acre country estate, Boden Park (in what is now the suburb of Rathfarnham), where William Drury bred pedigree Alderney cattle. Having graduated in Mathematics as the 22nd wrangler in Cambridge in 1873, Henry went on to serve as a master in that subject at Marlborough College, Wiltshire. Already well into middle age, Henry Drury married Anne Elizabeth Reilly, 20 years his junior, in Scarvagh, Co. Down, the bride’s native village, in 1902. Her distinguished family numbered prominent Williamite army officers, sprung from the native Irish aristocracy.
Henry and Anne Elizabeth had three other children. These were Myles (an architect who became the Exeter diocesan surveyor), Mary Temple Drury (a missionary in Africa) and Margarete Elizabeth Vallency Watson of Hobart, Tasmania. Con seems to have been called after a paternal uncle, Major Maurice O’Connor Drury, a physician in the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), who had died following an accidental gunshot wound the year before Con’s birth. Con was to follow his namesake uncle into the RAMC in 1939 and, despite his English birth and education, his army record, as his request, gave his nationality as ‘Irish’. Drury spent vacation time in Galway during his school and University days; his manual of flora and fauna is marked by notes recording plants identified on botanical trips around the county – and there are traces in his writings of an interest also in geological features. The Drurys had several family connections with Connaught, not least (through marriage) with the descendants of the leading Anglican prelate of that province, the Archbishop of Tuam, the Most Revd and Hon Power Le Poer Trench (1770–1839), a portrait of whom hung in Con Drury’s childhood home. There was also a close family contact with the Wentworth Thompson family. This family was doubly inter-married with the Drurys. Both D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson Snr, Professor of Greek at the Galway Queen’s College, and his son, Professor D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson Jnr, married Drury women. The son was a very famous marine biologist. 5
However, what proved to be the most important West of Ireland connection from the point of view of Wittgenstein biographers may well have been that established by Con’s aunt, Pamela Elizabeth Drury, who lived in Salrock, Cushkillary, Co. Galway until her death in 1918. She had run a school there, probably under the auspices of the ‘Irish Church Missions to the Roman Catholics’. This mission had been fostered by Archbishop Trench as President of the ‘Irish Society’ and was much resented by its target beneficiaries. Presumably – in view of a familiarity with the area arising from his aunt’s prior connection with it – Con’s brother, Myles, acquired a former coastguard cottage in 1927 in nearby Rosroe, at the mouth of Killary Harbour. The cottage became a family holiday home shared with his mother and brother – and eventually, Wittgenstein.
Drury and Wittgenstein in Cambridge
In common with successive classes of philosophy students in Cambridge in the 1930s, Drury found Wittgenstein a revelation. A visiting student from Oxford in the 1929–30 academic session, Arthur MacIver, conveys in his diary the arresting appearance of the new arrival from Austria: ‘At a Saturday morning session of Moore’s … “Conversation Classes”’, there appeared ‘a man, thin and with a long neck, wearing a pale blue shirt without collar or tie, a grey flannel suit and an M.A. gown, whom I took to be Wittgenstein and it turned out that I was right’. 6 This manner of dressing – and a distinctive form of speech – was to become characteristic of what became a growing number of Wittgenstein’s acolytes.
During his army years, Wittgenstein managed to work on a book that derived from his interaction with Russell. This was published first in German under the title Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung (1921) and then in English with a title suggested by Moore, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) – echoing Baruch Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. When, after the war, Russell read Wittgenstein’s book, he professed not to understand it although the author made strenuous efforts to explain it to him.
However, other philosophers – at first notably in his native city of Vienna – saw the Tractatus as offering what Wittgenstein himself asserted it to be: a kind of final solution to philosophical enquiry regarding the limits of knowledge. He had proposed that this question is best approached by investigating how language, the perceptible product of ‘mind’, functions. The question then became ‘what is entailed in language being meaningful?’ Wittgenstein argued that language is reliable only when stating facts, where what is known mirrors the world. To explain this he advanced a theory of ‘logical form’ where the primitive elements of the world – atomic objects, which he made no attempt to specify – mirror the simplest parts of language – names – in turn conjoined or disjoined by linguistic operators (and, or, etc.). All other uses of language are either tautological or meaningless. This means that language asserting religious, ethical, moral, aesthetic and more generally metaphysical ‘truths’ were ‘senseless’. However, in a move that was ignored by the ‘Vienna Circle’ philosophers, Wittgenstein closed his text with the assertion that these areas – although inexpressible in language, and so meaningless – addressed human concerns much more significant than fact-stating. 7
Wittgenstein dealt with this paradoxical conclusion – made all the more so in that the very language-use in the Tractatus was, on its own terms, inadmissible – by stating that what could not be said could still be pointed to. He now put this maxim into effect by turning his energies from a finalized philosophy to training in elementary school teaching followed by service in remote montane schools. However, as already mentioned, he was not forgotten in Cambridge. In the event however, he saw the invitation to return as an opportunity to re-visit his earlier published conclusions rather than to lead an attempt to construct a new version of Russell’s ‘Theory of Types’, as Keynes and Ramsey had hoped. 8 Wittgenstein eventually abandoned the theory of Logical Atomism, which featured centrally in the Tractatus, influenced by an Italian economist, Piero Straffa, with whom he became friendly in Cambridge in the 1930s.
However, Drury maintained that certain statements to be found in the Tractatus were of enduring significance. These were: firstly, ‘everything that can be said can be said clearly’ (Wittgenstein, 1922: 4.116), and secondly, ‘there is indeed the inexpressible this shows itself, it is the mystical’ (6.522). Drury’s understanding was that the critique of language-use, which Wittgenstein took to be the task of philosophy, had the complex objective of saying only what could be said, so that thereby one was led to what was beyond the competence of language to express. Drury believed that, at least in some cases, the desire for the extra-linguistic amounted to a feeling for the metaphysical – a feeling that, for example, drove Hegel towards the ‘absolute’. However, Hegel failed when he tried to express the absolute through linguistic ‘metaphysical constructions’. 9 The critique of language had its classical origins in Socratic interrogation aimed at disciplining participants to say only what they knew. Drury saw this asceticism as especially pertinent to the testing of hypotheses in modern scientific investigation. A sense of the limitations of our scientific knowledge would produce, he hoped, a still valuable, if now denigrated, contemplative sense of wonder regarding the world and the mysterious nature of human existence – equivalently referred to by Kant in the Critique of Practical Reason as the ‘starry heavens above … and the moral law within’.
Integral to Wittgenstein’s renewed engagement with philosophy was a critique of how it was conducted at the time of his return in Cambridge. There is a document (Wittgenstein, King and Lee, 1980: 72–81) that may have been drafted by Drury, listing several objections to philosophy identified by Broad and which, Wittgenstein, in turn, commented upon. It seemed that, firstly, philosophy reached no conclusions. Next, its methods were wrong. Further, it was taught as a succession of theories that appeared at various historical intervals. 10 Finally, it now looked as if philosophy was being replaced by the positive sciences.
Wittgenstein, who professed that he wanted to bring a business-like approach to philosophy (exemplified by his father who had had an immensely lucrative career in the Bohemian iron and steel industry) affirmed that it was possible to reach secure conclusions provided that correct methods were deployed. He thought it incumbent upon him to devise such methods. Distancing himself decisively from the most fundamental feature of the Cambridge pedagogy of philosophy, Wittgenstein showed scant regard for historical regurgitation of philosophical theories. 11 Indeed, in some striking cases he was unabashedly ignorant of the philosophical canon. This ignorance might be traced to his own belated involvement in the subject to which he switched after first pursuing studies in engineering, thus avoiding the conventional initiation offered to undergraduates. Despite this background, Wittgenstein put technological and scientific advances in their place by remarking that their significance was always overstated at the time of their invention and discovery. 12 Further, he considered that the contemporary cultural master-idea of progress (in constant need of affirmation through innovation) had insinuated itself into the warp and weft of contemporary life, malignly affecting shared values.
It was characteristic of Drury that when introducing his ‘Conversations with Wittgenstein’, he wrote:
The reader will be annoyed, as I am disgusted, by my frequent dumbness and stupidity in these discussions. If only I had been able to stand up to him and insist on further elucidation, how much more interesting these conversations might have been! But to argue with Wittgenstein required an alacrity of mind and speech, and a certain obstinate courage, and these were virtues I did not possess. (Drury, 2016b: 777)
It is surprising then that in MacIver’s diary a quite different picture of the student Drury vis-à-vis Wittgenstein emerges; a particularly striking example is an account of how, at a meeting of the Moral Sciences club, Wittgenstein ‘argued with Drury for the whole evening’. The argument continued even after the meeting was adjourned at 11 p.m. and went on for another three-quarters of an hour – although ‘Drury, tired out’, did not stay until the end and went to bed. The argument (which centred on Wittgenstein’s thesis that ‘statements about other people’s feelings only have meaning as statements about their behaviour’) was further prolonged in Moore’s ‘Conversation Class’ which Wittgenstein attended the following day. MacIver notes that ‘the last thing that I heard as we came away [from the class] was Drury and Wittgenstein arranging a meeting place in which to continue the argument’ (MacIver’s diary, 9 Nov. 1929). MacIver records that a resolution to the problem regarding ‘statements about other people’s feelings’ took place at a meeting of the ‘Wittgenstein Society’ in Drury’s rooms later in the month. Although there were 10 persons present, this again turned out to be a ‘duologue between Wittgenstein and Drury’. Perhaps worn down, Drury ‘declared himself at last convinced of the truth of Wittgenstein’s main doctrine’ (21 Nov. 1929), 12 days later.
This episode is only the most vivid of several recorded by MacIver that show Drury in a different light from both how he saw himself and appeared to others in later life. What impresses one familiar with the generality of student/faculty interaction in an era of mass education is the manifest intimacy. That atmosphere makes it easier to understand how it could happen that Drury would invite Wittgenstein to lunch, and the latter would invite him for walks and to the cinema, thus establishing a friendship that was to be lifelong.
Religion
Given Drury’s background and his intention to be ordained, it is not surprising that their early conversations dwelt on the topic of religion, about which Wittgenstein was keen to broaden his student’s horizons. He introduced Drury to Sir James Frazer’s studies of primitive religion, the first volume of which he had Drury read to him, and recommended William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. Given his interest in the subject, Drury had difficulty when Moore declared that he would not lecture on the Philosophy of Religion, a topic advertised in the University Calendar, because he had nothing to say about it.
Drury felt that Moore was dodging an important issue and said as much to Wittgenstein. This evoked a silence for a few minutes that Drury remembered for many years after. Wittgenstein broke the silence by asking Drury whether he had to hand a copy of Augustine’s Confessions. Drury produced the Loeb edition, and Wittgenstein immediately found the excerpt he was looking for. It was translated in that edition as ‘and woe to those who say nothing concerning Thee, seeing that those who say most are dumb’, and Wittgenstein declared that this translation completely misrepresented Augustine’s meaning. He suggested instead a translation that ran: ‘and woe to those who say nothing about Thee, giving as their excuse the fact that chatterboxes talk a lot of nonsense’. On the basis of this mistranslation, Wittgenstein declared ‘I won’t refuse to talk to you about God and about religion’ (Drury, 2016a: 769).
This seems surprising, given that Wittgenstein had in the Tractatus assigned religion to the ineffable. Early in their relationship, however, Wittgenstein had disclosed to Drury that he had ‘suffered greatly from morbid fears’ as a child and found that only religious feelings could cure them – a disclosure that Wittgenstein feared would lead Drury to think him ‘mad’ (Drury, 2016b: 779). Drury tried to re-assure him to the contrary citing his Irish background – a culture noted for its permeation by religion. However, this did not reassure Wittgenstein. He made it clear that he was discussing religion, not superstition, which he seems to have believed Irish practice exemplified. 13
There ensued much discussion between the two men about New Testament interpretation, much invigorated since the nineteenth century by the exegetical investigations of German scholars; the historicity of the Hebrew scriptures and the ethical challenges posed by particular texts therein; the contributions of various theologians, historical and contemporary; and the future of Christianity. Wittgenstein made clear, however, that the test of historicity which cropped up frequently in such discussions had little or no bearing on authentic Christian living. Nor had Wittgenstein much regard for such philosophical arguments as those proposed by the Hulsean Preacher at Cambridge, F.R. Tennant, who in his Philosophical Theology developed a version of the argument from design which concluded that the existence of God was probable. 14 Up to even a few days before Wittgenstein died, Drury and Wittgenstein argued about the role of reason in discourse about Christian faith – the fundamental issue underlying these discussions – with Wittgenstein seeming to argue for a fideism such that reason has no significant role in religious matters.
Drury’s priestly vocation
There was a practical dimension to these discussions, viz. Drury’s impending move to Westcott House, the Anglican seminary in Cambridge, to prepare for ordination. From a reference Broad wrote for him a few years later, 15 it seems that, consistent with this intention, ‘Drury made a special study of Theology, and even in the Tripos … made very good use of his knowledge of such theologians as St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure’. This was despite Wittgenstein’s strenuous campaign to have him change his mind. Graphically, Wittgenstein argued that the clerical collar would ‘choke’ him. What Wittgenstein does not appear to have disclosed to Drury was that as a demobilized soldier he had considered presenting himself for priesthood in the Roman Catholic communion of his baptism. Already, he had become so devoted to a copy of Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief – bought while serving as a soldier – that he became known to his military comrades as the man with the Gospels. 16 Further, he had gladly attended Mass, routine in the Austrian army. Moreover, he resorted to prayer at some periods of his life. 17 In sum, it is plausible that Wittgenstein saw something of his own struggles in Drury, who meanwhile had had an outstanding student career, being awarded research and senior scholarships and a starred first degree. 18
Drury enrolled in Westcott House in 1930, while continuing to attend Wittgenstein’s classes in philosophy. He was still subject to Wittgenstein’s dissuasion from the course of action he had taken. Visiting Drury, Wittgenstein professed to be shocked at the lack of holy awe and respect he detected in the seminary. His evidence was hardly convincing: the placing of a crucifix over Drury’s bed and the presence of a piano in the College chapel loft. Eventually, Drury decided he had made a mistake and withdrew from the College. He felt that ‘something much more costly’ (Drury, 2016b: 769) was required of him. According to his sister Mary, however, the decision caused him intense suffering ‘especially as some whose opinion he valued, misunderstood him’ (Letter to Paul Drury, 23 Jan. 1977).
Life among ‘ordinary people’
Wittgenstein now advised Drury to mingle with ‘ordinary people of a type you at present know nothing about’ (Drury, 2016b: 796). In March 1932, Drury volunteered to work on various projects with a group of unemployed ship-workers in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. When a lectureship post was advertised at the local Armstrong College (later Newcastle University), Drury’s application was unsuccessful – an outcome that Wittgenstein, who declared that teaching philosophy was a ‘ridiculous’ occupation, was pleased about. 19 Later in 1932, Drury went to Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales to assist in a market garden project for unemployed miners. While he was there, a friend became mentally ill. This prompted Drury to consider taking up training as a psychiatric nurse. He sought an interview with the medical superintendent of the hospital, where his friend was being cared for, about this proposal. He was given instead the advice that in view of his academic qualifications, he should study medicine and then specialize in psychiatry.
However, Drury did not have the financial resources to implement such a plan. Wittgenstein came to the rescue, arranging a subvention from two of his friends, Maynard Keynes (who subscribed £150 of the annual fees of £170) and Gilbert Pattison (who agreed to lend £100, if required). His mother covered his living expenses and his sister, Mary, also contributed and so it was that in the academic year 1933–4 it became possible for Drury to enrol in the School of Physic at Trinity College Dublin (TCD). This led to his acquiring expertise in several of the experimental sciences, whose limitations his teacher had cautioned him about. In addition, Wittgenstein advised him that he would no longer discuss philosophy with him. Although Wittgenstein adhered to this decision imperfectly, Drury was no longer privy to the development of Wittgenstein’s second foray in philosophy during the 1930s. At this point, Wittgenstein made ‘a radical break with the idea that language always functions in one way, always serves the same purpose: to convey thought [as he had held in the Tractatus] – which may be about houses, pains, good and evil, or anything else you please’ (Wittgenstein, 1958: I, 304). Prominent among the ‘anything else you please’, was, of course, God and religion. Indeed, it is clear he had already abandoned the tractarian ban on the possibility of discussion of those subjects at Drury’s request. Meanwhile, Drury read philosophy extensively and deeply whenever he had the opportunity and was to engage in regular discussion on topics at least contingent to philosophy with Wittgenstein in Dublin in 1948–9. After his teacher’s death, Drury frequently exchanged lengthy letters with Rush Rhees, often checking his own understanding of Wittgenstein with an acknowledged expert.
Medical student
During the six years Drury was in Dublin studying medicine, he and Wittgenstein took holidays together. In September 1934 Wittgenstein, his partner Francis Skinner and Drury spent a fortnight in Connemara, where Wittgenstein met Drury’s mother for the first time. On the basis of a short conversation she, previously wary, professed herself ‘much happier’ that her son was being ‘guided by’ such a teacher (Drury, 2016b: 799). At Easter 1935, Wittgenstein joined the Drury family for a holiday in Woolacombe, north Devon, and again in 1936 in Exeter. In June of that year, Wittgenstein and Skinner came to Dublin, a city that struck Wittgenstein as having ‘the air of a real capital city’ rather than of ‘an English provincial town’ (Drury, 2016b: 810).
In 1934 Wittgenstein and Skinner had considered living and working in Russia, and Wittgenstein even entertained the possibility that the pair might study medicine there. In September 1935 he did visit the USSR, but alone as Skinner was too ill to travel. When Wittgenstein abandoned the idea of settling in Russia, he wrote to Drury that he and Skinner were ‘seriously thinking of coming to Dublin and joining’ him in the study of medicine. Wittgenstein asked Drury to ‘make enquiries about the possibility of’ his two friends ‘entering the medical school’. When Drury appraised his TCD tutor of this enquiry he was met with astonishment. Nevertheless, in a later letter, Wittgenstein suggested to Drury that if he were to qualify as a doctor, the two ‘might practice together as psychiatrists’ as ‘he felt that he might have a special talent for this branch of medicine’ (Drury, 2016b: 809).
Wittgenstein and psychiatry
Wittgenstein’s interest in psychiatry was made clear when he came to stay in Dublin for a period of five weeks in 1938. He asked Drury to try to arrange for him to have discussions with seriously mentally ill patients. In furtherance of this request, Drury arranged for Wittgenstein to be interviewed by Dr Richard R. Leeper, Medical Superintendent of St. Patrick’s Hospital in James’s Street. This institution is one of the oldest mental hospitals in the English-speaking world, being founded shortly after the death of Dean Jonathan Swift in 1745, drawing on an endowment left in his will (see Malcolm, 1989). Leeper authorized Wittgenstein’s visits. Presumably, his approach to the patients was guided by what he described in his notebook for that year as ‘Freud’s idea’ that ‘in madness the lock is not destroyed, only altered; the old key can no longer unlock it, but it could be opened by a differently constructed key’ (Wittgenstein, 1980: 33e). Of one patient, Wittgenstein said memorably that he was ‘much more intelligent than his doctors’. Drury was struck by how gentle and helpful Wittgenstein was with the man. However, one day, when Drury intervened in a discussion that patient and visitor were having on Herbert Spencer’s philosophy, Wittgenstein told him to ‘shut up’. Wittgenstein later explained: ‘when you are playing ping-pong you mustn’t use a tennis racket’ (Drury, 2016b: 812).
Drury was probably not in need of this rebuke at the time, as he was finding his residency in the casualty department of the Royal City of Dublin Hospital in Baggot Street very demanding; also he was experiencing difficulty in executing routine procedures (such as suturing a wound) as he had developed a tremor in his hands. This state of affairs led to a vocational crisis which he discussed with Wittgenstein. In reply he received a letter that stands as a model of good sense: ‘Look at peoples’ sufferings, physical and mental, you have them close at hand, and this ought to be a good remedy for your troubles … I think in some sense you don’t look at peoples’ faces closely enough … I wish you good thoughts but chiefly good feelings’ (Drury, 2016a: 774–5).
War intrudes
Perhaps because Wittgenstein was aware of the burdens Drury was already carrying, it is clear from Drury’s account of the impact Hitler’s annexation of Austria had on Wittgenstein that the latter did not confide in him anything like the full extent of his concerns at the time. As Drury (2016b: 811) tells the story, ‘to my surprise [Wittgenstein] did not seem unduly disturbed’ when on 12 March the invasion occurred – nor admitted to concern about the fate of his two sisters living in Vienna. In fact, however, so anxious was Wittgenstein about his sisters’ predicament that he contemplated going to Vienna immediately, but was strongly warned against doing so by Piero Straffa, whose Communist connections in Italy had alerted him to the perils involved for persons classified as Jewish, such as the Wittgensteins. The Wittgenstein family engaged in lengthy negotiations aimed at securing the favourable racial classification of Mischling (mixed blood) for its members. Contrary to a determination by the relevant bureaucracy, the desired classification was accorded personally by Hitler in August 1939 upon payment of enormous sums mainly in gold bullion. Meanwhile, Wittgenstein sought, and was accorded, British citizenship. Among his sponsors was Drury’s mother.
Drury was registered as a medical practitioner in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland on 16 March 1939, having achieved first place in his class. He took up a general practitioner post in the Welsh Rhondda Valley. Very soon, he was advised to make himself available for service in the RAMC. On hearing this news, Wittgenstein and Skinner came to visit Drury. The three were staying at the New Inn Hotel, Pontypridd, on the Sunday that Britain declared war (3 September 1939) and then proceeded to Drury’s home in Exeter. Wittgenstein expressed the belief that even together, England and France would be unable to defeat Germany. While Wittgenstein and Skinner volunteered to serve in an ambulance brigade, Drury was asked to report to a reception station in Devonport, Plymouth, where he received an emergency commission as Lieutenant. He spent most of the next year in Houndstone Camp in Yeovil. During this period, France fell to the German Blitzkrieg, and the British forces had to be ferried home from Dunkirk. More mundanely, Drury became critical of his senior medical officer, but when he voiced his complaints to Wittgenstein, he was advised about the importance of discipline and obedience to military superiors.
In November 1940 Drury was probably glad in the circumstances to be transferred to Blandford Camp attached to the 209th Heavy Anti-Aircraft Artillery Regiment. In the following month he commenced a short course at the School of Tropical Medicine in Liverpool, preparatory to an assignment in the Middle East. Wittgenstein and Skinner came to say farewell and presented Drury with a silver drinking cup, chosen perhaps because of silver’s disinfectant qualities. In January 1941 Drury, now a Captain, travelled to Gourock in Scotland and embarked on an eight-week voyage round the Cape to Egypt, arriving there on 11 March. He was assigned to No. 6 General Hospital, attached to a large army encampment at Abbassia, outside Cairo. A military struggle, considered of prime strategic importance in this theatre of war, was then in progress. Eventually Erwin Rommel’s Afrikakorps was defeated at the second battle of El Alamein by forces commanded by Bernard Montgomery, concluding on 4 November 1942. Meanwhile, Skinner died on the 11 October, to Wittgenstein’s great grief. Wittgenstein had by then secured a post as a dispensary porter at Guy’s Hospital in London, 20 and Drury kept in touch by writing brief letters – a correspondence which has not survived. Drury made what was for him a significant purchase in a Cairo bookshop – Essays on Truth and Reality (1914) by the idealist F.H. Bradley. Characteristically, Drury was attracted to Bradley’s passion for the absolute. It was akin to the passion that he believed had led Wittgenstein to point to what lies beyond language in the Tractatus. Drury found, however, that Bradley had made Hegel’s mistake of attempting to describe in words the ‘Absolute’ (where the paradoxes underlying empirically based knowledge are resolved).
Drury’s stay in the Middle East lasted until 11 December 1943; he arrived back in England on 5 January 1944. After visiting his family, he went to see Wittgenstein who by that time was in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. While still based in Guy’s Hospital, Witttgenstein had been invited to transfer to a Clinical Research Unit there as a ‘Laboratory Assistant’. The unit, directed by Dr R.T. Grant, was set up to investigate what was popularly called ‘wound shock’. Research subjects were readily found among victims of air-raids in London. When the air-raids abated, the unit was transferred to the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle, where many who suffered traumatic industrial accidents were treated. While there, Wittgenstein proposed a method for use by battlefield triage personnel to gauge the blood loss of wounded servicemen. Soft-tissue damage, as measured by a closed fist, proved to be a reliable ready reckoner of such loss. For example, damaged tissue to the extent of three fists indicated loss of 30 percent. Apparently, this method came to be widely used throughout the RAMC to guide decisions on the need for blood transfusion. Wittgenstein also constructed an apparatus that recorded on a rotating drum the relationship between breathing and pulse, and he showed the device to Drury (see Kinlen, 2003–4).
Drury was next sent to the No. 6 General Hospital in Llandilo, South Wales. As it happened, Wittgenstein came to stay in Swansea with Rush Rhees at that time and met occasionally with him. Now classified as a ‘Graded Physician’, Drury was then posted as a medical officer on board a landing craft bound for Normandy. Arriving there on 19 July 1944, he commenced work in a tented hospital. Conditions became very difficult. Following the battle of the Falaise Pocket, large numbers of German soldiers were captured. Many were wounded, and there was widespread infection, spread by swarms of mosquitoes which fed on dead horses and unburied corpses. Paris was taken in August and Brussels in September. The intense fighting that characterized the battle of the Bulge followed, and it took until 23 March 1945 for the Allies to cross the Rhine. Victory Europe Day was 7 May 1945. On 22 June 1945 Drury was assigned to a British Casualty Clearing Station where he assessed wounded personnel to determine the further medical care they required. On 13 September 1945 he was demobilized.
Drury returns to Ireland and takes up psychiatry
Drury secured an appointment as a house physician in the Taunton and Somerset Hospital in early 1946, and so began a period of ‘considerable emotional turmoil and indecision’ for him. He found it ‘difficult to settle down after the experiences of war’. He had a visit in Taunton from Wittgenstein to coincide with the latter’s birthday, but Drury (2016b: 821) now dreaded ‘the powerful influence he exercised over’ him, and wanted to make his own decisions. Meanwhile, the two exchanged postcards only. He later described his emotional state to a close friend, Raymond Townsend, a New Zealander, that a ‘great fear came over me, this wasn’t just that I couldn’t decide what to do, but that all my life seemed empty and my thinking quite vain. I felt that I would be glad to die, but not in such a way that I thought of suicide’. By the time he wrote those words in a letter (13 Oct. 1946), he had returned to Ireland and registered to study for an MD degree at TCD writing a thesis on ‘The significance of posture in the aetiology and treatment of chronic disease’.
Drury also confided to Townsend that he had made a confession to a Church of Ireland priest. Thereafter, the disabling fear that had beset him lost its power such that he was ‘able to rejoice and thank God for the fear he sent me. It seems to me that I had never really believed in God before, but now I do’ (13 Oct. 1946). This spiritual place of rest did not come, however, from his philosophical conviction of an ‘absolute’. As he made clear in the last of his letters to his son, ‘the God of religion means a great deal more than the absolute of philosophy’. His commitment, as with Pascal before him, was to the ‘God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not the god of savants and philosophers’ (26 Apr. 1954). 21 Thereafter he lived out this conviction through regular church-going, remarkably wide reading in the history of spirituality, and notable kindness to patients.
Drury’s career as a psychiatrist began with an appointment to a temporary post as an Assistant Medical Officer in St. Patrick’s Hospital, much changed from when Wittgenstein had been allowed to visit patients there, courtesy of Drury’s representations. Dr Leeper had died in 1941 and after a challenging period, a new superintendent was appointed, Dr John Norman Parker Moore (1911–96). Moore had been a fellow student of Drury at TCD and suffered a relapse of a tuberculosis – originally contracted as a schoolboy – not long after qualifying. The socially isolating nature of recovery from that disease drew him to psychiatry, initially at St. Patrick’s and, in 1941, at the Crichton Royal Hospital in Dumfries, Scotland, where he became Deputy Medical Director. While at the Crichton, Moore served with several German and Austrian psychiatrists, who had fled their native countries before the war. Prominent among these was Professor Wilhelm Mayer-Gross (1889–1961), a former student at Heidelberg University of Karl Jaspers, a psychiatrist who became a prominent philosopher. Meyer-Gross’s doctoral research was on bipolar depression. As Director of Research at the Crichton Royal, he investigated the possible therapeutic uses of mescaline and lysergic acid and administered insulin coma treatment for psychotic conditions.
Moore’s appointment coincided with the passing of a Mental Treatment Act by the Irish parliament, which led to a reform of the very poor psychiatric services in the country. St. Patrick’s, under Moore, was a leader in this endeavour. He made several important staff appointments – not least Eileen Herbert, who took over as matron on 6 October 1947. She had served in the Royal Crichton before the war and then in the Queen Alexandra nursing corps in India. This was a period when new treatments were coming on stream to augment the established pharmacopoeia of barbiturates, bromides, paraldehyde and a mix of morphine and hyoscine. Electroconvulsive therapy for depressive disorders had already been offered in the interval before Moore took charge, and investigations into the technique of prefrontal leucotomy pioneered by the Portugese neurosurgeon, Antonio Egas Moniz, were authorized by the Board of Governors. In addition, insulin shock therapy was used and also various biochemical remedies with antidepressant and/or tranquillizing effects.
Wittgenstein’s stay in Ireland
Drury was to engage with these innovations, but cautiously. The dependence of mental functioning on the brain had never been more evident. Although he was undoubtedly aware of the permutations of theories addressing the ‘Mind-Brain Problem’ listed wearily by the brain surgeon Henry Marsh as ‘functionalism, epiphenomenalism, emergent materialism, dualistic interactionism or was it interactionistic dualism?’, Drury preferred to stress that what Marsh so much later referred to as ‘the electrochemical chatter of one hundred billion cells’ (Marsh, 2014: 120) yielded at the limits of medical intervention to the ever-present mystery of consciousness and of the self.
Drury’s service in St. Patrick’s proved to be very onerous, made the more so by his conscientious nature. The burden was not relieved when Wittgenstein, following a decision to resign his professorship of philosophy at Cambridge in 1947 in order to concentrate on writing, decided to reside in Ireland. During the course of a fortnight’s visit by Wittgenstein to Dublin in August of that year, Drury had suggested this course of action to him. Arriving at the end of November, Wittgenstein stayed first in Ross’s Hotel close by St. Patrick’s. He became concerned for Drury, noticing the ‘continual whirl of activity’ (Drury, 2016b: 822) he was subject to even while taking a meal in the doctors’ mess. He wondered whether Drury had the right temperament for psychiatric practice. Drury confessed that he sometimes found his patients symptoms ‘extremely puzzling’, and Wittgenstein assured him that this was a reaction to be welcomed: ‘you must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common-sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded’ (Drury, 2016b: 821). What Wittgenstein meant may perhaps be gleaned from a contemporary notebook where he wrote that perhaps ‘madness need not be regarded as an illness. Why shouldn’t it be seen as a sudden – more or less sudden change of character’ (Wittgenstein, 1980: 54c, original italics). For his part, Drury, open too to different perspectives and far from casual, wrote in The Danger of Words: ‘I believe that we must let our psychiatric patients see that we understand that they are in a state of affliction which is not comparable to any bodily pain however severe. To communicate such an understanding is not easy’ (Drury, 1973: 90). As it happened, Wittgenstein himself was soon to suffer emotional disturbance and needed Drury’s care.
Wittgenstein’s hope had been to find in Ireland the kind of remote setting he had enjoyed both before and after World War I in Norway. After a dispiriting search, he became a farmhouse guest of the Kingston family at Kilpatrick House, Red Cross, Co. Wicklow. To begin with, Wittgenstein could report in a letter to G.H. von Wright that ‘he felt a good deal better here than in Cambridge’ (22 Dec. 1947; McGuinness, 2008: 420) and to his sister, Helene, that ‘the country here would not have so many attractions for me if the colours were not often so wonderful’ (19 Jan. 1948, quoted in Monk, 1990: 521). He spent hours each day sitting at a mahogany table set against a window in a bedroom overlooking the kitchen garden and writing in German in a large ledger-size notebook. He took daily walks and even on occasion wrote outdoors.
Conversations on psychiatry and psychoanalysis
Drury came to visit once a month and, on one of their countryside strolls, the conversation turned to Drury’s practice of psychiatry. Wittgenstein advised him to ‘always take a chair and sit down by the patient’s bedside; don’t stand at the end of the bed in a dictatorial attitude’ (Drury, 2016b: 823) – behaviour he had observed, according to Rhees, while working in Guy’s Hospital. Wittgenstein had read Eliot and William Sargant’s Introduction to Physical Methods of Treatment in Psychiatry (1944), and raised no objections to the treatments described therein, which were however later to be widely regarded negatively. With reference to the ‘talking therapy’ associated with Freud – whose Interpretation of Dreams Wittgenstein had given Drury as a birthday gift in 1936 – he saw no incompatibility between such an approach and the use of drugs and other physical treatments. Psychological and physical explanation (and treatment) could co-exist. Thus, a dream might have been evoked by something disagreeable eaten for dinner, but its content was amenable to analysis. Wittgenstein was critical, however, of Freud’s proposal that all dreams are wish-fulfilling and believed that they could just as plausibly be interpreted as arising from fears – a point, as Drury informed him, that had already been made by Pierre Janet, an ‘alienist’ whom Drury esteemed, using Drury’s preferred nomenclature for their shared profession.
Wittgenstein had a hunch, without having concrete evidence to hand, that the ‘real germ of psychoanalysis came from Breuer’, not Freud – although he immediately went on to say that that germ ‘can only have been quite tiny’ (Wittgenstein, 1980: 36e). This view seems to have rested on a belief that because Freud (like Wittgenstein himself) was of Jewish extraction, he lacked inventiveness and originality. In an extraordinarily self-deprecatory statement, Wittgenstein asserted that persons of his ilk needed to be stimulated by non-Jewish influences before their characteristic racial talent for elaboration would assert itself. This talent manifested itself in in striking explanatory metaphors. Indeed, two such metaphors played a central role in Wittgenstein’s attempt to explain how language works after abandoning fact-stating. These are the images of ‘language games’ and ‘family resemblance’. 22 There is a multiplicity of ‘language games’, which are similar in being rule-following but otherwise relatable to one another only in the loose way that family members are thought to resemble one another.
Drury, for his part, could think of only one of Freud’s remarks that might be associated with a ‘great philosopher’ in contrast to ‘a very clever man’. This was when Freud described the aim of psychoanalysis as to replace neurotic unhappiness with ‘ordinary unhappiness’. As he wrote to Rhees, Drury did not think that a ‘healthy man is one who has a good time’ (22 Mar. 1968). Rather, ‘periods of anxiety … and melancholy’ are ‘a necessary part of every human life’ (Drury, 1973: 22). Wittgenstein had close acquaintance with persons who had undergone psychoanalysis – his sister Gretl, Frank Ramsey, and a nephew, Tommy Stonborough – and in the 1940s came to see it as a practice that could be dangerous. In extended conversations Wittgenstein had at that time with Rush Rhees on Freud (Rhees, 1982), he underlined also the theoretical deficiencies of psychoanalysis, whereas in 1919 he had accorded Freud the accolade of a psychologist with ‘something to say’.
Wittgenstein’s depressive episode in Wicklow
In February 1948, Drury had cause to worry about Wittgenstein’s mental health. Shortly afterwards, Wittgenstein complained in letters to friends about his ‘nerves’ such that he could no longer work with facility and tired easily. So much so that he wrote to his successor in Cambridge, von Wright, that ‘I often believe I am on the straight road to insanity’ (17 March, 1948; see McGuinness, 2008: 424). Wittgenstein sent a telegram to Drury requesting a meeting in Dublin. He said that he had done no work for a fortnight and could not sleep; he complained that noise emanating from the Kingston family quarters beneath his was driving him ‘crazy’ and that he was now determined to find an abode free of such distractions. Drury offered the hospitality of his brother’s cottage in Connemara and meanwhile prescribed sleeping tablets, while also suggesting that Wittgenstein should consult Dr Norman Moore so that he could have a ‘second opinion’. Moore later disclosed that he found Wittgenstein a ‘depressed and sad man’ (quoted in Berman and Fitzgerald, 1994). At that time, routine therapy for a depressive illness would have been the prescription of amphetamine tablets and, if proved necessary, hospitalization to allow for electroconvulsive treatment. In the event, Wittgenstein was not hospitalized. However, after indicating to Drury that he would accept the invitation to stay in his brother’s Connemara cottage, he was laid low for two weeks on his return to Wicklow by a severe bout of influenza. So delayed, he arrived in Rosroe on 28 April 1948.
Recovery in Connemara and Dublin
While in Connemara, Wittgenstein was tended to by a family retainer, Tommy Mulkerrins, who apparently had been advised by Drury that the family guest had suffered a nervous breakdown. Mulkerrins brought him fresh milk every day and found more favour with Wittgenstein than the Kingston family had in Wicklow. Wittgenstein was able to resume work, and Mulkerrins was now tasked with burning rejected manuscript material, the large volume of which Drury only appreciated later. Given the isolation of the site, he had few visitors and the locals thought him eccentric. Wittgenstein’s enquiries were now engaged by investigations emanating from Gestalt psychology and, in particular, the phenomenon of ‘seeing as’ – illustrated by Joseph Jastrow’s ‘Duck-Rabbit’ figure, featured in the Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein, 1958: II, xi, 194e). This threw light on the different meanings that can attach to the word ‘understand’. He considered too the idea that there is a harmony between mind and reality. A Viennese-based philosopher, Franz Brentano, had in the nineteenth century revived a medieval idea he sourced in Aquinas – intentionality – which defined mental activity as ineluctably directed to an object. This was taken up very widely in the twentieth century, including by Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein took what he assumed would be just a break from Connemara in August 1948. However, when he returned to Dublin in late October after periods in England and Vienna, he decided not to spend the winter season there. In this he was influenced by Drury who was apprehensive that if Wittgenstein were to fall ill in Rosroe during the cold season, medical attention would not be readily available to him. Wittgenstein lodged instead at Ross’s Hotel where he secured a quiet room at the top of the building. There followed one of the most fruitful periods of his working life. Drury, who saw him nearly every day, got the impression that he was ‘writing copiously’ on the philosophy of psychology and one the most fundamental philosophical problems: how to arrive at ‘certainty’. Some of this writing was done while sitting on a step in the heated Palm House of the nearby Botanical Gardens. Close by also were the Zoological Gardens. While walking there, Drury and Wittgenstein discussed appropriately Darwin’s theory of evolution which Wittgenstein thought lacked the ‘necessary multiplicity’ (Drury, 2016b: 828). Their conversation that day reinforced what had become a central Wittgensteinian lesson: to attend to the multiplicity of phenomena. Reductive ‘essentialist’ definitions served not to enlighten but to blind one to reality. On a more personal level, Wittgenstein had to soothe Drury when an incident involving a violent and abusive female patient had so undermined him that he thought he should abandon psychiatry.
Intimations of Wittgenstein’s cancer
For his part, Drury’s apprehension about his friend’s health proved to be well justified. As 1949 unfolded, Drury had to arrange for Wittgenstein to see the Professor of Medicine at TCD, an eminent diagnostician, Thomas G Moorhead, for symptoms presenting in the intestines. A full examination in hospital in May yielded the result that, although he had ‘an unexplained anaemia’ (Drury, 2016b: 834), no growth in the stomach, as had been suspected, could be found. At this stage, Wittgenstein stated he had insufficient philosophical stimulation in Dublin. Local practitioners of philosophy were, with few exceptions, oblivious to his presence in the city. Perhaps more to the point, Drury had grown close to Eileen Herbert, the matron of St. Patrick’s and, in fact, became engaged to marry her in the following year. Wittgenstein decided to accept an invitation from the philosopher Norman Malcolm to come to his home in America.
While in up-state New York, Wittgenstein fell ill, and it was a matter of some concern whether he would be able to travel back to Europe. However, in October, he rallied enough to get back to England. On his return, he made contact, at Drury’s suggestion, with Dr Edward V. Bevan, who had served with Drury in the same RAMC unit. Bevan’s investigations led to a definite diagnosis of prostate cancer on 25 November 1949. Wittgenstein received hormone treatment and was able to spend Christmas in Vienna, where his sister Hermine was also suffering from cancer. After her death on 11 February 1950, he returned to England, staying from 4 April with the philosophers Elizabeth Anscombe and her husband, Peter Geach, at their home in Oxford. He travelled to Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge for X-ray therapy during the course of 1950, but moved to Cambridge on 8 February 1951 for easier access to treatment, staying in the Bevan home.
Wittgenstein dies
Drury married Eileen Herbert in Lucan, Co. Dublin on 28 March 1951. The newly-weds spent their honeymoon on Lake Como. On the way home, Drury stopped off in Cambridge to see Wittgenstein and the two men engaged in quite heated debate provoked by Drury expressing the view that some passages in the Old Testament seemed to be inconsistent with the message of the New Testament. Wittgenstein’s riposte to such criticism was ‘you don’t understand, you are quite out of your depth’. A reconciliatory mood marked their parting with Wittgenstein putting Drury on the train with the words: ‘Drury, whatever becomes of you, don’t stop thinking’ (Drury, 2016b: 837).
On 28 April, Dr Bevan, realizing that Wittgenstein was dying, sent for his friends. He was still alive the next morning when Drury arrived from Dublin. There then occurred an incident that greatly troubled Drury for the rest of his life. Apparently no arrangements had been specified by Wittgenstein regarding the manner of his funeral. A discussion took place among the friends present, and Drury took the lead in the absence of any other volunteers to address the matter. He recalled that Wittgenstein had approved of how Leo Tolstoy had arranged that his dead brother, Sergey, be buried according to the rites of the Russian Orthodox Church in which he had been baptized, although Leo himself had in fact by then been excommunicated from it. Drury suggested that this might provide an insight into what Wittgenstein, baptized a Roman Catholic, might regard as proper – although it is not obvious how the anecdote ‘quite fits the occasion’ (Monk, 1990: 580). At any rate, a majority of those present agreed that a Dominican priest, Fr Conrad Pepler (who had previously had pastoral conversations with Wittgenstein) should say the prayers for the dying. Pepler also arranged for a Roman Catholic burial in the former cemetery of St Giles in Cambridge on 1 May 1951. The course of action later attracted much criticism. 23
St Edmondsbury Clinic: Drury’s charge
When in 1949 Drury had decided to specialize in psychiatry, he secured a Diploma in Psychological Medicine from the Royal College of Physicians in Ireland. In the autumn of 1950 he was asked by Norman Moore to take over temporarily as the medical officer in charge of St Edmondsbury, a ‘branch hospital’ of St. Patrick’s. Set in a large country estate on the banks of the river Liffey, some miles west of the city, it comprised a ‘Ladies Hospital’ and a ‘Gentleman’s Villa’. By the time of Drury’s marriage in 1951, it had become clear that Drury would be posted there indefinitely, and he and Eileen moved into private quarters which, in time, they shared with their two boys, Luke and Paul. 24 Drury took charge of a 50-bedded hospital where he was on duty 24/7, and after some years was promoted to Senior Consultant Psychiatrist. The patients were, in the main, privately funded or benefited from chancery arrangements. To relieve a stressful situation, Drury improved a pre-existing walled garden, inviting patients to assist him. Short-staffed though the facility was, conditions there were far superior to those prevailing in the public psychiatric institutions of the time in Ireland – some of which had wards of up to 120 patients and, while providing custody, offered little by way of therapy. 25
The exigencies of his situation did not preclude Drury from involvement, mainly through Rush Rhees and Elizabeth Anscombe, in guarding the memory of his former teacher, who meanwhile had become the dominant force in anglophone philosophy. This included participating in a BBC radio programme, and writing up the journal of his interaction with Wittgenstein which has been used extensively in this article. He gave a lecture at University College Dublin in 1967 addressing misinterpretations that he felt had been propagated by such eminences as A.J. Ayer, Gilbert Ryle and John Austin. Again, when allegations were made about Wittgenstein’s homosexual behaviour by Bartley (1973), Drury joined the chorus of epistolary criticism in the Times Literary Supplement.
More specific to psychiatry, he read a paper on a ‘Series of cases treated by the ECT-pentothal-curare technique’ to a meeting of the Royal Medico-Psychological Association held at another Irish private clinic, the Verville Retreat, Clontarf, Dublin, in April 1949. He taught a subject then described as ‘Normal Psychology’ to medical students at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin for eight academic years beginning in 1956/7. He came to believe that this course was an unnecessary encumbrance on an overcrowded curriculum and discontinued teaching it. More pertinent to this decision was that he had severe doubts about the topic itself. In this regard, it is clear from some of the arguments to be found in the Danger of Words (1973) that he was influenced by Wittgenstein’s work. A chapter of the book is devoted to a ‘logical exposition’ of the thesis to be found at the end of the Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein, 1958: II, xii), which Drury paraphrased as ‘in psychology the real problems that confront us, and the experimental methods which are being increasingly elaborated, pass each other by’ (Drury, 1973: 30). A further chapter concerned this remark’s relevance to an over-weening neurophysiology. In this regard, he singled out for criticism JC Eccles’s The Neurophysiological Basis of Mind (1953) arguing that Eccles was ‘trying to solve a philosophical puzzlement [about the nature of consciousness and the self] by an irrelevant empirical investigation’. The basic problem, as Drury saw it, was that the valuable investigations by anatomists, physiologists, biochemists and physicists – adduced by Eccles to answer what manner of being we are – depend upon ‘sensory perception, memory, language’. Because the investigators use these tools, they have to assume their validity. As he put it, they ‘cannot in turn investigate’ them (Drury, 1973: 82). A complementary road has, however, always been available – in poetry and philosophy, exemplified above all in Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions. Drury held that the field of psychology, in particular, had lost a vital connection by abandoning classical philosophical enquiry, in which it had traditionally lodged, in favour of empirical investigation. The ethical question of how to conduct one’s life, so closely bound up with an appreciation of our mysterious being, cannot await ever revisable empirical conclusions. It demands ‘an answer from us, now, at once’ (1973: 87) that we can rely on.
It seems that Drury was fearful of the addictive potential of the psychotropic drugs now available to doctors and even more of the misuse of mescaline and lysergic acid as a short-cut to mystical experience. This fear may have led him to the administration of hypnotic therapy for anxiety states. He began operating an outpatient clinic five evenings a week from 7 until 9 p.m. He wrote up a series of lectures he gave students on this topic drawn from his experience with over 700 patients (Hayes, 2017).
Wittgensteinian inspired psychiatry
As well as being the best source for Drury’s view of experimental psychology, The Danger of Words (1973) records his reflections on psychiatry. He reminded his fellow practitioners of various fallacies that cause confusion when talking to patients and misunderstandings when discussing problems with colleagues. He suggested that psychiatry was at the stage chemistry was before Lavoisier, with a nomenclature for various conditions but no systematic classification system. Equally, the terms often employed – for example, ‘psychopathic personality’ – were ‘symbols of our ignorance rather than of any understanding’ (p. 6). Indeed, ‘misconceived erudition’ characterized much so-called ‘research’. Constipation ‘with facts’ can lead to an incapacity to produce nothing ‘but wind’ (p. 9). Especially at the early stages of any science, there are so many unknown factors at work that the researcher can be misled and in this respect Drury thought that the widely employed double blind trial was misleading (p. 11). Drury’s experience was that treatments come and go in a process comparable to natural selection. Thus, when he first came to psychiatry the only available treatment for schizophrenia was insulin coma therapy but, with the introduction of chlorpromazine, that therapy fell into disuse. Convinced that genuine scientific advances are rare, he sometimes wished that ‘it was a law that every scientific paper had to be allowed to mature for ten years in bond, like good whisky, before being allowed into print’ (p. 15). He was aware of a tendency among researchers of fact-proofing to preserve a favoured hypothesis. Thus, Freud proposed many subsidiary hypotheses to support the empty thesis that all dreams fulfil sexual wishes. Again, Drury thought that certain labels used by psychiatrists – ’alcoholic’ and ‘hysterical’, for example – should be replaced because they were likely to offend the patient and so make him or her resistant to therapy.
His most startling suggestion in the Danger of Words concerned patients where religion was manifest in their symptoms. Sometimes, he wondered, if God first had to make mad those whom he would save, and he cited historical examples. He may have been thinking also of a patient he had come across sitting on her bed reading the bible: he felt she had grasped the book’s message better than a legion of exegetes – despite or maybe because of her adversities. 26
Drury suffered from heart disease in his sixties and in 1969 retired from St Edmondsbury. He died in the late afternoon of 25 December 1976.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.