John Charles Bucknill

Sir John Charles Bucknill FRS (25 December 1817 – 19 July 1897) was an English psychiatrist and mental health reformer. He was the father of judge Sir Thomas Townsend Bucknill QC MP.

Bucknill was born in Market Bosworth, Leicestershire, and educated at Rugby School and at University College, London. He served as an assistant to his father, a surgeon, and began formal medical training in Dublin, transferring after a year to the University of London.

Bucknill believed that insanity was a brain disease that could be treated with medication. He became acquainted with Dr. John Conolly's work at the Hanwell Asylum in Middlesex where no restraints were used to control agitated patients. Bucknill became an ardent supporter of this procedure. He had a special interest in the Lunacy laws and the protection of the civil rights of patients.

He qualified as a doctor in 1840, obtained a Licentiate in the Society of Apothecaries and membership in the Royal College of Surgeons. He worked as a surgeon's dresser at University College Hospital and began private practice in Chelsea. From 1844 to 1862 he was medical superintendent at Devon County Asylum.

In 1875, Bucknill travelled to America. He visited ten asylums in the United States and three in Canada, reporting his findings in a book titled Notes on Asylums for the Insane in America. He praised the private Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia, McLean in Boston, and Bloomingdale in New York, but was sharply critical of the public asylum, Blockley in Philadelphia and the New York City asylums on Ward's and Blackwell's Islands. He approved of the National Hospital for the Insane in Washington (now St. Elizabeth's). He also met Dorothea Dix in Washington and saw her again when she visited England.

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