A room full of women sleeping in low beds, heavily sedated with drugs and given frequent electric shocks, sounds like something from a Soviet gulag. Such a place could in fact be found near Waterloo Bridge in London in the 1960s and 1970s, when women suffering from conditions such as postpartum depression and eating disorders were ‘treated’ by an egomaniac psychiatrist. Jon Stock’s new book reveals a scarcely credible medical scandal that unfolded within earshot of Big Ben.

The actor Celia Imrie was one of those women. She was admitted to the terrifying ward five at the Royal Waterloo Hospital in 1966, when she was just fourteen. Imrie was anorexic and knows she was given both ‘insulin shock therapy’ and the anti-psychotic drug Largactil. Her memory is fragmented and she can’t remember whether she was ever taken to the notorious ‘sleep room’ or subjected to electro-convulsive therapy (ECT). The woman in the next bed was, and Imrie’s recollection of the sights and sounds of the episode is extraordinarily vivid: ‘The huge rubber plug jammed between her teeth; the strange almost silent cry, like a sigh of pain, she made as her tormented body shuddered and jerked; the scent of burning hair and flesh.’ Some patients suffered broken bones while they struggled to free themselves from restraints; if the ‘treatment’ didn’t work, an even worse horror awaited in the form of lobotomy. ‘Only’ five patients died as a result of their experiences in the ‘sleep room’. The doctor who presided over it like a visiting deity, William Sargant, was never held accountable.

On the contrary, he was lionised and invited to speak at conferences all over the world, and made regular appearances on television and the radio. Sargant liked to move in the highest circles, enjoying the fact that some of his guinea pigs were from prominent families. ‘I can think of