Frederick Walker Mott

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Sir Frederick Walker Mott KBE FRCP FRS (1853–1926) was a British pioneer of biochemistry who linked brain disease and hormones to mental illness. He worked as a psychiatrist and social scientist and gave the Croonian Lecture for the Royal College of Physicians in 1900. Mott imagined a London hospital for mental illness—the Maudsley Hospital—drawing on Emil Kraepelin’s clinic in Germany. He led the funding and building negotiations, ran the pathology laboratory moved there, and treated shell‑shock patients during World War I. He helped show that general paralysis of the insane was caused by syphilis, a finding that boosted his reputation, but he was criticized for emphasizing biological, degenerative explanations for mental illness and shell shock. After the war, he argued that shell shock was rare in volunteers and mainly affected conscripts, not a new disorder but a variation in those already predisposed. Like some contemporaries, Mott believed mental illness could be inherited through degenerate family lines, though his methods were questioned by other eugenicists. He also proposed that mental disease came from pathology of the sexual reproductive system, citing signs such as atrophied testes as evidence of brain dysfunction in certain areas.