John Haslam

John Haslam (1764–1844) was an English physician and writer on insanity. Trained as an apothecary, he served from 1795 to 1816 as resident apothecary of Bethlem Hospital in London, where he published Observations on Insanity (1798), one of the first clinical descriptions of what would later be called schizophrenia, and Illustrations of Madness (1810), the detailed case history of the patient James Tilly Matthews. He was dismissed with the physician Thomas Monro after a parliamentary inquiry of 1815 into conditions at Bethlem, afterward took a medical degree and practiced in London, and wrote on medical jurisprudence and on the moral management of the insane.