Prestwich Hospital in the twentieth century: a case study of slow and uneven progress in the development of psychiatric care

In 1921 Montagu Lomax published his book The Experiences of An Asylum Doctor, in which he used his experiences as a locum at Prestwich Hospital to criticize standards of mental health care in Britain. Lomax's criticisms of Prestwich Hospital led to a Royal Commission and the 1930 Mental Treatment Act. However, many of the circumstances described by Lomax could still be observed at Prestwich in the 1960s and 1970s. The oral testimony of nurses who worked at Prestwich between 1922 and 1975 and documentary sources are considered in an attempt to explain how a hospital which had been the centre of debates about psychiatric reform in the nineteen-twenties failed to emerge as one of the country's more progressive psychiatric hospitals.