ABSTRACT
Thomas Chivers Graves, like most of his contemporaries in the psychiatric profession, has now fallen into obscurity. For more than a quarter of a century, though, he was one of the major figures in British psychiatry, his standing among his peers being recognized by his election in 1940 as President of the Royal Medico-Psychological Association (RMPA). Because of the war, he was to continue in that office until November, 1944, making his tenure as its head the longest in the organization’s history. Of more direct moment from a practical point of view, his position as Chief Medical Officer to the Birmingham Mental Hospitals Committee (even as he simultaneously served as superintendent of two of them, Rubery Hill and Hollymoor Mental Hospitals) “gave him supervisory powers over all the other mental hospitals controlled by the City of Birmingham” (Anonymous 1964a: 1711) and placed him in charge of many thousands of patients, thereby ensuring that his views on psychiatric therapeutics were implemented on a broad scale.
