William Charles Ellis

William Charles Ellis (1780 to 1839) was an English physician who became one of the best known asylum superintendents of the early nineteenth century. After a start as an apothecary in Hull he learned the care of mentally ill people at the Sculcoates Refuge, a house run on lines similar to the York Retreat. In 1817 he took charge of the newly built West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum at Wakefield, and in 1831 he and his wife, who served as matron, opened the Hanwell Asylum in Middlesex. Both asylums were run on humane treatment and moral therapy, and at Hanwell the couple added what he called the Great Principle of Therapeutic Employment, giving patients purposeful work so that they regained self-esteem and recovered sooner. He was knighted in 1835, resigned from Hanwell in 1838 after disagreements over enlarging the asylum, and died of dropsy in 1839.