The Stoke Park Colony was an institution for the housing, care, and treatment of individuals with mental disabilities in Bristol, England. The Colony was founded in 1909 and reconstituted as the Stoke Park Hospital in the 1950s. The Stoke Park Colony was founded by the National Institutions for Persons Requiring Care and Control (NIPRCC), a charitable trust responsible for the funding, maintenance, and direction of a network of institutions for the care of individuals with mental disabilities in Bristol and its surrounding areas. The NIPRCC’s founder, missionary and philanthropist Reverend Harold Nelson Burden (1859-1930), played a key role in the 1904 Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded and the subsequent Mental Deficiency Act of 1913, which together advocated for the institutional separation of those with mental disabilities into newly built ‘colonies’. The Stoke Park Colony was the first such institution to be certified by the British government under the 1913 Act. Built on the site of Dower House, an eighteenth-century manor bought by Burden from the Duke of Beaufort in 1901, the Colony was held up by the NIPRCC as an exemplary site where individuals with mental disabilities could be given both medical care and occupational training, such as lessons in weaving, gardening, and carpentry. The Colony was greatly expanded between 1909 and 1917 through the buying up of surrounding land and the building of new accommodation blocks. In 1917, the Colony was granted an expanded licence for housing 1,528 ‘inmates’, making it the largest licenced institution in the country. The Colony became a key site for neurological and psychiatric research in the following decades, with Burden encouraging physicians to visit and study its inhabitants. This research agenda was greatly expanded after Burden’s death by his wife, Rosa Gladys Burden (1889-1940), who founded the Burden Mental Research Trust in 1933. The Trust provided £10,000 to fund investigations, and later oversaw the building of a dedicated epilepsy clinic on the site in 1936. The clinic opened in 1939 as the Burden Neurological Institute, which established itself as a pioneering site of neurological, psychiatric, and neuroscientific research in the latter half of the twentieth-century. Following the establishment of the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948, direction of the Stoke Park Colony was passed over to the Ministry of Health in the early 1950s. The Colony was reformulated as the Stoke Park Hospital, which remained open until 1997.

The Burden Neurological Institute (BNI) is an independently-funded research unit and registered charity specialising in the investigation and treatment of neurological, psychological, and psychiatric disorders. The BNI opened in 1939 at the Stoke Park Colony in Bristol, England. The BNI was named after philanthropist Rosa Gladys Burden (1891-1939). Burden’s husband, Reverend Harold Nelson Burden (1859-1930), founded the Stoke Park Colony with his first wife Katherine Mary Burden (1856-1919) in 1909. The Colony became the first certified institution for the care of individuals with mental disorders in Britain following the passing of the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. After Harold Burden’s death in 1930, Rosa continued his sponsorship of medical research by founding the Burden Research Trust in 1933, a £10,000 research fund to support medical and psychiatric studies of the Colony’s patients. In 1936, the Trust built a dedicated epilepsy clinic on site with a fully-fitted operating theatre, two small wards, and several laboratories. The clinic was officially opened on 12 May 1939 as the Burden Neurological Institute, under the directorship of neuropsychiatrist Frederick Lucien Golla (1878-1968). The BNI’s work was soon disrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939. Throughout the conflict, the site was used as a neurosurgical hospital by the Emergency Medical Service (1938-1945), a state-run network of free hospital services organised by the Ministry of Health. Despite these duties, the laboratories remained open and research projects continued, such as a programme of electroencephalographic (EEG) research on war casualties who had sustained head injuries. Following the end of the war and the establishment of the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948, Golla fought to keep the BNI independent to ensure that researchers could continue to choose their own projects. The BNI did, however, provide neurophysiological services for nearby hospitals for an annual fee. From its foundation, the BNI took a leading role in the development of neurological and psychiatric expertise in Britain. Researchers at the BNI carried out the country’s first trial of electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) in 1939, closely followed by the first prefrontal leucotomy in 1940. The BNI also established itself as a centre of innovation in engineering, cybernetics, and early robotics during the post-war years, due in great part to the work of neurophysiologist William Grey Walter (1910-1977). Walter’s best-known inventions, his Machina Speculatrix (small robotic tortoises designed to model the basic functions of the human brain) attracted national attention, appearing in newspapers, on television, and at the Festival of Britain in 1951. After several years of financial uncertainty, the Trustees of the Burden estate sold the Stoke Park site to the Ministry of Health in 1968. While clinical work continued under the NHS at the newly constituted Burden Neurological Hospital, the Institute’s scientific researchers decided to remain separate, turning the BNI into a Company Limited by Guarantee in 1970. In 2000, the BNI moved its headquarters to the Rosa Burden Centre at Southmead Hospital, Bristol, following the final closure of the Stoke Park site in the late 1990s.

(1891-1940), philanthropist Rosa Gladys Burden (née Williams) served as superintendent of the Stoke Park Colony, Bristol, around the time of the First World War. The Colony had been founded by the missionary and philanthropist couple Reverend Harold Nelson Burden (1860-1930) and Katherine Mary Burden (1856-1919) as an institution for the separation, rehabilitation, and occupational training of individuals with mental disabilities. Rosa became a close friend of the Burdens in her superintendent role, and, following Katherine’s death from a stroke in 1919, Harold and Rosa married on 12 May 1920. For the next decade, Rosa continued to support the Colony’s work and that of its charitable trust, the National Institutions for Persons Requiring Care and Control (NIPRCC). Following Harold Burden’s death from heart disease in 1930, Rosa took over his position as Warden of the NIPRCC and expanded his sponsorship of medical research at the Stoke Park Colony. She established the Burden Research Trust in 1933, a £10,000 fund to support medical and psychiatric studies of the Colony’s inhabitants. In 1936, the Trust oversaw the building of a dedicated clinic for the study of epilepsy, with a fully-fitted operating theatre, two small wards, and several laboratories. The clinic was officially opened on 12 May 1939 as the Burden Neurological Institute, under the directorship of neuropsychiatrist Frederick Lucien Golla (1878-1968). The Institute would go on to establish itself as a pioneering neuroscientific research unit in the latter half of the twentieth-century. Rosa Burden died shortly after the opening of the Institute, on 17 September 1940.

(1900-1970), endocrinologist Max Reiss was born in Stanislau (now Ivano-Frankivsk), western Ukraine on 1 May 1900. He received his medical education from the German University of Prague and worked as a demonstrator and assistant in the clinic of endocrinologist Artur Biedl (1869-1930) before qualifying in 1925. After this, Reiss expanded his clinical and experimental interests in endocrinology, particularly focusing on the influence of gonadal and anterior pituitary hormones on metabolic processes. With the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Reiss was forced to flee from Prague and came to Britain on the invitation of neuropsychiatrist Frederick Lucien Golla (1878-1968). Golla provided Reiss with a research post at the Burden Neurological Institute, Bristol, an independent research unit specialising in the investigation and treatment of neurological, psychological, and psychiatric disorders. Reiss later became Director of the Institute’s Endocrinological Department. While at the Burden, Reiss was a key player in establishing the field of ‘psychoneuroendocrinology’ (the study of the interactions between genetics and hormones in cases of psychiatric illness and mental disability) and encouraged the expansion of endocrinological treatments in various Bristol psychiatric hospitals. In the early 1960s, Reiss promoted this approach in the United States through his new role as Director of Psychiatric Research at the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, New York, where he made several investigations into potential links between mental disability and reduced growth hormone levels. Willowbrook later attained international notoriety for hepatitis experiments conducted on children in its care and was shut down in 1987. Max Reiss died suddenly of an embolism in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire on 27 July 1970.