Forgotten Women in Psychiatry: Jessie Murray (1867-1920)

By Dr Gordon Bates, Historian in Residence at the RCPsych.

This month the College is marking women in psychiatry as a part of International Women’s Day. There are many good reasons for this. Psychiatry may be a medical specialism which has one of the highest proportions of women in training and in consultant posts, but there remains a shortage of women in research and in senior leadership roles. As a result, there are fewer role models for women to follow.

There have been many exceptional women working within the specialty but their achievements seem to be less celebrated than their male counterparts. The history of science is dominated by old white men and psychiatry is no different. More recently, historians have tried to account for and correct this gender imbalance. It is partly related to opportunities to participate in scientific research and partly related to a clear bias in science history writing.

In an attempt to address this observation for the mental sciences, I plan to write a series of blog posts about psychiatry and psychology's forgotten women. If readers have suggestions about suitable women to recover, publicise and celebrate, then please email me at historian@rcpsych.ac.uk.

Jessie Murray

My first forgotten woman in psychiatry is Jessie Margaret Murray, the driving force behind London's first hospital and outpatient service for neurotic and psychosomatic illness, the Brunswick Square Clinic (also known as the Medico-Psychological Clinic (MPC)). Jessie Murray was a remarkable woman, suffragette and physician. Interested in psychology throughout her medical career she was a member of the Society for Psychical Research (one of the homes of early twentieth century psychology) and the Medico-Psychological Association (the forerunner of the Royal College of Psychiatrists). Her British Medical Journal obituary described her as ‘a brilliant and many-sided personality’.

There are no known photographs of Jessie Murray (image under CC license.)

Jessie was born in British India in 1867. Her father rose to the rank of colonel in the British Army but the family returned to the United Kingdom and lived in London from 1891. After the death of her father, she embarked on medical training with the help of her friend and lifelong companion, Julia Turner, who had just achieved a degree in Classics from the University of London.

Jessie initially studied at the London School of Medicine for Women and completed clinical training in Newcastle. After nine years she qualified BM, BS. She was interested in psychological medicine from an early stage and attended lectures by Pierre Janet in Paris and worked with Charles Spearman at the newly established Department of Psychology at University College London. Her MD was submitted to the University of Durham in 1919 and was titled ‘Nervous Functional Diseases from the Point of View of Modern Clinical Psychology.’ She was far-sighted aiming to ‘establish a working understanding between the physician and the psychologist’ to benefit the patient and community.

Jessie was a suffragette who was prepared to take direct but non-violent action to ensure women were given the right to vote. Following the Black Friday demonstrations of 1910, she collected written statements from women who had been physically and sexually assaulted and presented them to the Home Office, demanding a public enquiry. She also refused to pay tax without a vote and the bailiffs regularly took property from her home to pay her debts.

Foundation of the Medico-Psychological Clinic

Perhaps her greatest achievement was the foundation of the MPC. She and Julia Turner originally offered treatments from their home in Endsleigh Street but moved the hospital to Brunswick Square in the summer of 1914 after securing funding. This early centre for talking cures operated between 1913 and 1921 and was one of the first training institutions for psychological therapies. They offered hypnotism, suggestive therapy, re-education and persuasion as well as an early version of Freudian analysis.

Part of the training required students to undergo their own therapy, a condition that was later adopted by the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). The clinic’s staff and students became influential in the British Psychological Society, the Tavistock clinic and early British psychoanalysis. They called this early mixed form of empirical treatment ‘orthopsychics’, but it has become known as British eclectic therapy.

Endsleigh Street, first site of the MPC (Image Mike Quinn: http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/1203805 geograph.org.uk)

The MPC was mostly staffed by women and was originally aimed at treating middle-class women. However, the First World War led to an increase in their capacity and number of beds particularly for those with shellshock. According to her obituary, ‘[D]uring the war she shouldered additional heavy responsibilities, entailing long hours and exhausting work and it is probable that this period of strain was partly responsible for her untimely death.’ Jessie Murray died of ovarian cancer, aged 53.

Brunswick Square (site of the Medico-Psychological Clinic), Numbers 30-38 in 1938 (Photo courtesy of English Heritage)

As an ardent suffragette it is poignant that her legacy was sullied by two men. Her successor at the MPC was the physician, James Glover. After receiving Freudian analysis in Berlin in 1921, Glover returned and decided that the eclectic school and its mixed training should be abandoned in favour of ‘pure’ European Freudian psychoanalysis and it could no longer run as a shellshock hostel. Murray’s partner Julia Turner was forced to close the clinic in 1922. Murray’s historical legacy was further undermined by the personal myth-making of Ernest Jones, Freud’s biographer and president of the IPA. Jones deliberately omitted the clinic from his influential history and described it elsewhere as having a ‘bad repute in the medical profession’ and the therapists as lay, neurotic women.  

References

• "Jessie Margaret Murray, M.D., B.S.Durham". The British Medical Journal. 2 (3123): 723. 6 November 1920.
• Boll, Theophilus E. M. (22 August 1962). "May Sinclair and the Medico-Psychological Clinic of London". Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 106 (4): 310–326.
• Martindale, Philippa (July 2004). "'Against All Hushing up and Stamping Down': The Medico-Psychological Clinic of London and the Novelist May Sinclair". Psychoanalysis and History. 6 (2): 177–200.
• Valentine, Elizabeth R. (9 April 2009). "'A brilliant and many-sided personality': Jessie Margaret Murray, founder of the Medico-Psychological Clinic". Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences. 45 (2): 145–161.