Lyttelton Stewart Forbes Winslow MRCP (31 January 1844- 8 June 1913) was a British psychiatrist famous for his involvement in the Jack the Ripper and Georgina Weldon cases during the late Victorian era.
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Born in Marylebone in London, the son of psychiatrist Forbes B. Winslow and Susan Winslow née Holt, Winslow was possibly the most controversial psychiatrist of his time. As a boy he was brought up in lunatic asylums owned by his father, and was educated at Rugby School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, transferring to Downing College at the University of Cambridge after four terms, where he took the M.B. degree in 1870.[1] He was also a D.C.L.(1873) of Trinity College Oxford and LL.D. of Cambridge University.[2] A keen cricketer, Winslow captained the Downing College XI.[3] In July 1864 he was a member of the MCC team which played against South Wales, in which team was W. G. Grace.[4] In 1871 he was appointed a Member of the Royal College of Physicians (MRCP). He spent his medical career in an attempt to persuade the courts that crime and alcoholism were the result of mental instability. His attempt in 1878 to have Mrs Georgina Weldon committed as a lunatic at the instigation of her estranged husband William Weldon resulted in one of the most notorious court cases of the nineteenth century.[5] The public notoriety the Weldon case caused earned him the displeasure of the medical establishment, which continued even after his death.
Winslow claimed that the Victorian vogue for spiritualism was causing widespread insanity among its followers in the United States. He supported this claim in his 1877 pamphlet Spiritualistic Madness. His assertion was fully controverted at the time by Dr. Eugene Crowell. In later years he lectured for the Spiritualist societies at Merthyr Tydfil and Cardiff. In reply to a question at Merthyr he publicly stated that while at the time that he made his assertion about the dangers of spiritualism he had honestly believed it to be true, he had since learned that he was mistaken and would no longer make any such statement. He also became an adherent of the benefits of hypnotism in dealing with psychiatric cases.[6]
He took an active role in securing a reprieve for the four people sentenced to death for the murder by starvation of Mrs. Staunton at Penge in 1877. In 1878 he inquired into the mental condition of the Rev. Mr. Dodwell, who had shot at Sir George Jessel, the Master of the Rolls. Other trials in which Winslow was involved were those of Percy Lefroy Mapleton, convicted of the murder on the Brighton line; that of Florence Maybrick, and that of Amelia Dyer, the Reading baby farmer.[4] He also appeared in many civil actions.[7]
He managed his father's asylums after his death in 1874, but these were removed from his control following a family feud, so he turned his attention to solving crimes by using the deductive and reasoning methods of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. Also in 1874 he changed his surname to Forbes-Winslow.
In 1888, with a little manipulation of the evidence, Winslow came to believe he knew the identity of Jack the Ripper, and believed that if he was given a team of six Police Constables he could catch the murderer.[8]
Winslow's suspect was Canadian G. Wentworth Smith, who had come to London to work for the Toronto Trust Society, and who lodged with a Mr and Mrs Callaghan at 27 Sun Street, Finsbury Square. Mr Callaghan became suspicious of Smith when he was heard saying that all prostitutes should be drowned. Smith also talked and moaned to himself, and kept three loaded revolvers hidden in a chest of drawers. Callaghan went to Winslow to express his suspicions, and he in turn contacted the police, who fully investigated his theory and showed it to be without foundation. Nevertheless, convinced that he was correct, for many years Winslow declared his theory at every chance, and claimed that his actions were responsible for forcing Jack the Ripper into abandoning murder and fleeing the country. In his 1910 memoirs Winslow describes how he spent days and nights in Whitechapel: "The detectives knew me, the lodging house keepers knew me, and at last the poor creatures of the streets came to know me. In terror they rushed to me with every scrap of information which might, to my mind, be of value to me. The frightened women looked for hope in my presence. They felt reassured and welcomed me to their dens and obeyed my commands eagerly, and I found the bits of information I wanted".[8] When Winslow's claims about knowing the identity of the Ripper were reported in the English press Scotland Yard sent Chief Inspector Donald Swanson to interview him. Confronted with this senior police officer, Forbes Winslow immediately began to back-pedal. He said the story printed in the newspaper was not accurate and misrepresented the entire conversation between himself and the reporter. He further stated that the reporter had tricked him into talking about the Ripper murders. In fact, Winslow had never given any information to the police with the exception of his earlier theory concerning an escaped lunatic, a theory which even Forbes Winslow abandoned.[9]
According to Donald McCormick, for a short period the police suspected Winslow of involvement in the killings because of his persistence and constant agitation in the Jack the Ripper case, and they checked on his movements at the time of the Ripper murders.[10] He gained further publicity, and visited New York City in August 1895, to chair a meeting on lunacy at an International Medico-Legal Congress.[11] He also appeared as an expert defence witness in some American cases involving lunacy.
His older brother was the Revd Forbes Edward Winslow, the vicar of Epping, while his sister, Susanna Frances, married the humorist Arthur William à Beckett. Forbes Winslow published his memoirs, Recollections of Forty Years, in 1910, and also wrote the Handbook For Attendants On The Insane. He founded the British Hospital for Mental Disorders in London,[8] and was a lecturer on insanity at Charing Cross Hospital and was a physician to the West End Hospital and the North London Hospital for Consumption.[7] A member of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) and a Vice-President of the Psycho-Therapeutic Society, he married twice. On his death at his home in Devonshire Street, Portland Place, London of a heart attack aged 69 in 1913 he left a widow, three sons and a daughter, Dulcie Sylvia, who in 1906 married Roland St. John Braddell (1880-1966).
Winslow appears as the central figure in the 2003 novel A Handbook for Attendants on the Insane.[12]
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