Abuse at The Royal Waterloo Hospital

Who was responsible for the abuse at the Royal Waterloo Hospital?Although Narcosis was actually given at the Royal Waterloo Hospital the psychiatrists, anaesthetists and nurses who administered the treatment were all on the staff of St Thomas’ Hospital. Dr William Sargant, a consultant psychiatrist set up Ward 5 in 1948 and opened the Narcosis Room in 1964. His colleague Dr John Pollitt who was also a consultant psychiatrist and who succeeded Dr Sargant as the Head of The Department of Psychological Medicine at St Thomas’ also admitted patients to the Narcosis Room.  

There can be no excuse for the authorities at The Royal Waterloo Hospital, St Thomas’ Hospital or the Department of Health who must have known what was going on in Narcosis. It is difficult to believe that there was no hospital gossip about what was happening in the small, dark room at the top of the stairs at The Royal Waterloo and so far as The Ward 5 Association is concerned, there were many staff at both hospitals who because of their silence, were also complicit in the abuse of hundreds of helpless mentally ill patients.

The psychiatrists who admitted their patients to the Narcosis Room left a detailed written account of Narcosis Treatment in Sargant and Slater’s 1972 book ‘An introduction to physical methods of treatment in psychiatry’. If they hadn’t, the following account of the treatment that they meted out to their patients would seem almost unbelievable. The lack of concern for their patients is evident in every line of their accounts of Narcosis Treatment. When you read the information on this website, please keep in mind that so far as the Ward 5 Association is aware, the doctors who invented and administered the treatment never undertook any research into what it might be like for patients to have to forcibly undergo Narcosis and what effect being helpless in the hands of their unrelenting tormentors would have on the minds of the women and girls that they imprisoned in the Narcosis Room at The Royal Waterloo. That fact alone is enough to convince former Narcosis patients that what was done to them was never primarily intended to improve their mental health but rather that their doctors were working to another agenda which included ruthless professional ambition and the sexual predilections of a particular psychiatrist at St Thomas’ Hospital.