ABSTRACT
John Conolly's place in the pantheon of heroes of English psychiatric history seems secure. But, paying due attention to the professional and social context of Conolly's life and career, one discovers that his biography teaches a great deal about the larger issues associated with the emergence of a professionalized psychiatry in Victorian England. For those in early Victorian England who was without independent means but aspired to gentlemanly status, the choice of careers was meager indeed. But Conolly's medical career is too long and varied to be reduced to a simple tale of his triumph as the author of "nonrestraint." Victorian medicine was marked by an enormous "division between the prestigious and influential men at the top of the profession and the ordinary practitioners. Having once had hopes of belonging to the elite, Conolly appeared to be thrust back, all but irretrievably, into the ranks of provincial obscurity.
