Joseph Shaw Bolton

Joseph Shaw Bolton FRCP (1867–1946) was a British physician, pathologist, alienist, neurologist, and professor of medicine.

After education at Spring Hill School in Whitby, Bolton worked as an assistant without formal qualification at an asylum and as an assistant to a general practitioner in Manchester. He graduated BSc (Lond.) in 1888 and then studied at University College London Medical School. There he graduated MB in 1894 and then became demonstrator of anatomy. By 1896 he graduated MD. From 1896 to 1899 he was lecturer on physiology at Birmingham's Mason Science College. He was from 1899 to 1903 pathologist at Claybury Lunatic Asylum. He was a senior assistant at Hellingly's East Sussex County Asylum from 1903 to 1905 and then at the County Mental Hospital, Rainhill from 1905 to 1910. From 1910 to 1933 Bolton was director of Wakefield's West Riding Mental Hospital. At the University of Leeds he was appointed in 1911 to the professorial chair of mental diseases, holding the chair until his retirement as professor emeritus.[2]

He was a determined opponent of the new psychiatry and expressed his views on the Freudian school in an article entitled Myth of the Unconscious Mind (1926). ... He emerged from his retirement to act as medical superintendent of Buckingham Mental Hospital and remained its consulting physician.[2]

In Whitby in 1906 he married Ellen Rogers. They had two sons and one daughter. Charles Bolton, FRCP, was J. Shaw Bolton's younger brother.[2]