William Battie

views updated

William Battie

1704-1776

English physician who published one of the first textbooks on psychiatry, the Treatise on Madness, in 1738. This marked the inauguration of psychiatry as a formal medical discipline. Psychiatry, which is now a recognized medical practice, has a number of tools to use in the fight against mental illness, considerably more than existed in the eighteenth century. Much of this progress began with the work of Battie.

More From encyclopedia.com