David Kennedy Henderson

Who was David Kennedy Henderson?

David Kennedy Henderson was a Scottish psychiatrist. He was knighted in 1947 and elected president of Edinburgh’s Royal College of Physicians in 1949.

He co-published with R.D. Gillespie A Textbook of Psychiatry, which became internationally influential for several decades. A series of lectures he gave in New York, America, were published as Psychopathic states in 1939, and ended up contributing to a narrowing of the public understanding of psychopathy as violently antisocial, though Henderson had described various different types many of which were not violent or criminal. The Henderson Hospital, a specialist national unit in London set up to manage and treat 'psychopathic' personality disorder, was named after him.

He was physician-superintendent in charge at the Gartnavel Royal Hospital in Glasgow from 1921 to 1932. His textbook on psychiatry has been described as the key to the Glasgow approach to mental illness, and Henderson in turn credited the approach of the influential Adolf Meyer whom he had worked with in America.