Henry Cotton

Henry Andrews Cotton (May 18, 1876 – May 8, 1933) was an American psychiatrist and the medical director of the New Jersey State Hospital at Trenton (now Trenton Psychiatric Hospital), in Trenton, New Jersey. During his tenure from 1907 to 1930, Cotton and his staff employed experimental surgery and bacteriology techniques on patients, which included the routine removal of some or all of patients' teeth as well as tonsils, spleens, colons, ovaries, and other organs. These pseudoscientific practices persisted even after statistical reviews disproved Cotton's claims of high cure rates and revealed high mortality rates as a result of these procedures. Cotton became the medical director of the New Jersey State Hospital at Trenton at the age of 30. As director, Cotton implemented changes to how the hospital operated, such as abolishing mechanical restraints, and requiring daily staff meetings to discuss outpatient care. Cotton was motivated by the new medical research of the 20th century, and held the belief that various mental illnesses were caused by untreated infections in the body. This theory, called biological psychiatry, was introduced to him by Dr. Adolf Meyer, and was in contrast to the eugenic theories of the era that emphasized heredity. At the time, Cotton was a leading practitioner of biological psychiatry in the United States. Education and career Henry A. Cotton 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. He studied medicine at Johns Hopkins University and at University of Maryland. Cotton began to implement the emerging medical theory of infection-based psychological disorders by pulling patients' teeth, as they were suspected of harboring infections. If this failed to cure a patient, he sought sources of infection in tonsils and sinuses and often a tonsillectomy was recommended as an additional treatment. If a cure was not achieved after these procedures, other organs were suspected of harboring infection.