Richard Rows (1866–1925) and “functional mental illnesses”: The interface between psychiatry and neurology, 1912–1926

Richard Rows may be an unfamiliar name to historians of psychiatry today, other than for his role as superintendent of the Red Cross Military Hospital at Maghull, near Liverpool, during the First World War. Accordingly, this paper attempts a conspectus of Rows’ career in order to contextualise the psychotherapeutic approach he developed, not only to “shell-shock” patients during the War but also to “functional mental illnesses” encountered in subsequent civilian practice. This examination shows that although Rows adopted some Freudian or quasi-Freudian psychological vocabulary and techniques, as did many of his contemporaries, he also had a long-standing commitment to a physiological conceptualisation of brain disorders. For Rows, this was not incompatible with, but complementary to, his psychodynamic approach in clinical encounters. His work extended beyond the limits of psychiatry to adopt perspectives originating with contemporary neurologists and experimental neurophysiologists.