The Portman Clinic was founded by Edward Glover in 1933 as the ‘Psychopathic Clinic’, with a consulting room n the West End Hospital for Nervous Diseases at 73 Welbeck Street.
On 18 September they saw their first patient: ‘a woman, 47 years of age, noted as having a violent temper, charged with assault on her woman employer’.
The name of the clinic was provided by Dr JA Hadfield and at that time did not have the pejorative connotations that it now has.
The staff were Drs: Wilfred Bion, Denis Carroll, David Eder, Marjorie Franklin, JA Hadfield, Jennings White, Aubrey Lewis, Miss Barbara Low, Drs Redfern, Rickman, Schmideberg, Adrian Stephen, Karen Stephen, Wilson and Sybil Yates.
During 1934 the ISTD saw and treated 29 patients at the West End Hospital, with four cases discharged.
For more information on the Portman Clinic read Stanley Ruszczynski’s A brief introduction to the history of the Portman Clinic or The Portman Clinic: An historical sketch