Henry Cotton (doctor)

Henry Andrews Cotton (1876 – May 1933) was an American psychiatrist and the medical director of New Jersey State Hospital at Trenton (previously the New Jersey State Lunatic Asylum, and now the Trenton Psychiatric Hospital) in Trenton, New Jersey from 1907 to 1930. 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. As a result, 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.

Henry A. Cotton had studied in Europe under Emil Kraepelin and Alois Alzheimer, considered the pioneers of the day, and was a student of Dr. Adolf Meyer of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, who dominated American psychiatry in the early 1900s. Based on the observation that patients with high fever often turn delusional or begin hallucinating, Meyer introduced the possibility of infections (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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