Medical societies and insanity in late-eighteenth-century London: the fight between Andrew Marshal and John Hunter.

In 1789, at a meeting of a small London society for the promotion of medical and surgical knowledge, Andrew Marshal (1742-1813) and John Hunter (1728-1793) engaged in heated debate regarding the association between mania and the structure of the brain. Marshal claimed to have observed abnormalities when dissecting brains of those who died insane and Hunter denied this connection. At the next meeting a scuffle between them ensued and they had to be parted. Although Marshal did not publish his observations during his lifetime, they were assembled by his assistant in 1815. Marshal's descriptions of the brains of hydrophobics and maniacs are worthy of note.