his money in the depression in the late 1920s and the scholarship allowed Sargant to continue his medical education. After qualifying as a doctor he worked as a house-surgeon and house-physician at St Mary's and looked set for a successful career as a physician. But in 1934—four years after qualifying as a doctor—a nervous breakdown and spell in a mental hospital cancelled his plans. Sargant would later attribute this period of depression to undiagnosed tuberculosis, although research which he conducted on the use of iron, in very high doses, for the treatment of pernicious anaemia was not well received and this disappointment may have contributed to his breakdown. After his recovery, Sargant worked as a locum at Hanwell Hospital, and then for a while helped his brother-in-law at his Nottingham general practice, before deciding on a career in psychiatry. In 1935 he was offered a post by Edward Mapother at the Maudsley Hospital. In his autobiography Sargant describes how Mapother's views coincided with his own: 'the future of psychiatric treatment lay in the discovery of simple physiological treatments which could be as widely applied as in general medicine'. Soon after he arrived at the Maudsley, Sargant was involved in testing amphetamine as a new treatment for depression and took it himself while studying for the diploma in psychological medicine. Sargant would take a variety of drugs to treat his depression throughout his life. Another treatment introduced at the Maudsley while Sargant was there was insulin shock therapy. In 1938 Sargant was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship to spend a year at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, under Professor Stanley Cobb. Whilst there he did some experiments on over-breathing and developed a theory that the difference between normal and neurotic people is that the latter have lost their suggestibility. On a visit to Washington he arranged to meet Walter Freeman and see three of his patients who had undergone psychosurgical operations. Although the results were not altogether successful, Sargant resolved to introduce the operation into Britain. Second World War At the outbreak of war in September 1939 Sargant returned to Britain to find that the Maudsley had been evacuated and divided into two—one half going to Mill Hill School in North London and the other half setting up a hospital in the old Belmont Workhouse near Sutton, Surrey. Sargant was sent, along with H.J. Shorvon, clinical director Eliot Slater, and medical