ABSTRACT
John Conolly's place in the pantheon of heroes of English psychiatric history seems secure. Conolly's first efforts to make his way in the difficult environment met with abject failure. Large segments of the Victorian public seem to have questioned both the motives and the competence of alienists who claimed expertise in assessing madness, and Conolly's published opinions and his actions both helped to feed these suspicions. Victorian medicine was marked by an enormous 'division between the prestigious and influential men at the top of the profession and the ordinary practitioners. Conolly not only played a central role in the success of the Victorian lunacy reform movement, but the vicissitudes of his individual biography nicely illustrate some of the general sociological features that attended the constitution of Victorian alienism as a specialism. But even Conolly's own position underwent dramatic internal evolution in the couse of his career.
