In the early 1950s, a group of Oxford medical professionals at the local Warneford Hospital carried out a pioneering study of student mental health. The researchers - psychologist May Davidson, psychiatrist Seymour Spencer, encephalographer D Lee, and physician RW Parnell - were in part motivated by their scientific interests in the ‘unusual and unusually fascinating problems posed by psychologically ill undergraduates.’[1] But they also saw their study as a crucial contribution to a heated political debate. Since the late 1940s, student mental health struggles had attracted considerable attention both within universities and in the press. While some dismissed the issue as ‘a problem which so far has not been shown to exist,’ the Oxford researchers had become concerned by the high rates of poor mental health, breakdown, and suicide they observed among their undergraduate patients.[2] They hoped that their study would contribute to a better understanding of the diagnosis, causes, and treatments for students’ “mental illness”, as they understood their patients’ problem.[3]

For their study, the researchers assembled a patient and a control group. At a time at which women were still largely prevented from studying at Oxford, each consisted of one hundred Oxford male students between the ages of 18 and 28. The members of the patient group had all been referred by their general practitioners to local hospitals on account of mental health issues. The control group were “healthy young men” from Oriel College, Magdalene College, and St Catherine’s Society who had volunteered to participate in the study.[4] Each participant underwent four psychological tests, had their body shape and physique type examined, their brain activity monitored, and was interviewed by a psychiatrist.[5] A study of such proportions and depth required the cooperation of a large set of people: medical specialists carrying out the tests, friendly colleagues offering to funnel their patients to the Warneford, academics helping to recruit student volunteers, nurses, family members, and hospital employees ensuring smooth progress, and, of course, willing student participants.

After the researchers completed the study, they promoted their findings through a series of scientific articles and academic talks.[6] They gave updated figures on the prevalence of “mental illness” among undergraduate students, suggested new methods of diagnosis, and debated the potential of various treatment courses. Their results, as we shall see, gathered national attention. But they also triggered tiny revolutions in Oxford itself. The alarming findings reshaped Oxford University mental health provision as well as exam regulations. The study found a close connection between stress from studies and the onset of breakdowns among the patient group.^[7] Close to half the students had a collapse in their mental health triggered by work or exam worries. In response, Spencer and Davidson oversaw one the earliest inpatient interventions for students. They arranged for a steady stream of Oxford students to enter the Warneford to study and take their exams within the hospital. In the wake of this arrangement, the Warneford Hospital became informally known as “Warneford College.”[8]

[IMG 1: Collage of article headings]

Not all of the Oxford group’s publications, however, were welcomed by the university administration and even the researchers themselves. In 1959, Spencer published a controversial paper titled “Homosexuality Among Oxford Undergraduates” in a specialist medical journal. This paper, too, built on the research Spencer and his colleagues had conducted at the Warneford. The article discussed the frequency with which the study participants had engaged in homosexual conduct, the nature of their homosexual practices, and the biographical and physiological characteristics of the homosexually active students.

[IMG 5: Screenshot of somatype graph]

[Image description: The Oxford group also sought to investigate whether there was any correlation between homosexuality and different body types (or ‘somatypes’). This graph depicts the distribution of their control group by body type. Today, such studies are thoroughly discredited.]

You might wonder why a study of student mental health had become so interested in homosexuality. Today, the association between homosexuality and student mental health struggles may not seem very obvious. But to Spencer, his colleagues, and many of their contemporaries in mid-century Britain, there was a direct connection. They regarded homosexuality as a harmful mental illness that required treatment, could potentially be cured, and, if left to foster, endangered the moral and social well-being of the nation writ large.[9] In this context, homosexually active students were bound to have their mental health questioned. ‘There [was] no group [GPs were] more ready to pass on to the psychiatrist,’ Spencer reported, ‘than the student complaining, in whatever guise, of homosexuality.’[10]

The fact that the Oxford group had collected new data on homosexuality was not a secret in their professional circles. Even before the publication of Spencer’s article, their research on homosexuality had attracted the attention of medical, legal, and political authorities. Social attitudes toward homosexuality were slowly softening in 1950s Britain. In 1954, the Church of England published an important report that supported the legalization of same-sex sex between consenting adults.[11] In the same year, the Conservative government was pressured into launching a Departmental Committee to review homosexuality’s legal status.[12] The committee’s influential 1957 report, the so-called Wolfenden Report, recommended the relaxation of the statutes regulating homosexual sex, and the decriminalization of homosexual sex between consenting adults over 21. One of the Oxford group’s researchers, May Davidson, had been called to serve as an expert witness for the committee and her testimony on the Oxford group’s findings was cited prominently in the report.[13]

[IMG 2: Wolfenden Report]

[Image description: A snapshot from the Wolfenden Report. The ‘witness’ the report referred to was Oxford-based psychologist May Davidson]

The publication of Spencer’s paper drastically changed who was reading and discussing the Oxford group’s research. On the same day that it came out, the tabloid Daily Express printed an alarmist article ‘Oxford: a startling report’ that shared an inaccurate, inflated version of some of the group’s findings. The Daily Express emphasized what it regarded as the concerning proportion of homosexuals among Oxford undergraduate body. ‘[A]bout one in three of freshmen entering Oxford University is [or has been] homosexual,’ the Daily Express exaggerated the Oxford group’s findings. Perhaps even more worrying for the university’s public reputation, the tabloid claimed that the university itself was partly to blame for these high numbers. It asserted that many of Oxford’s homosexually active students had not come homosexual to university. Instead, they had ‘become initiated into perversion while at Oxford.’ The people responsible for this corruption were the ‘at least 200 persisting practising perverts in Oxford’ who had made one of Britain’s most esteemed academic institutions a hotbed of vice and depravity.[14]

[IMG 3: Daily express article]

Against the backdrop of such public and sensational reporting, many of Spencer’s colleagues at the Warneford Hospital took offence at his publication. Spencer’s former supervisor superintendent Robert Gow McInnes was “so disturbed by the appearance of the article, its content and its title, that he had called a meeting of the senior colleagues involved.” At the meeting, Spencer’s former collaborators came to the unanimous decision that the article “was very regrettable” and promptly sent what they described as a “complete disclaimer” to the university’s Vice-Chancellor.[15] Their concerns did not relate to the scientific accuracy of the findings, which they had after all co-produced, but to the fact and manner of publication. Spencer’s colleagues “particularly deplored” the acknowledgements he published with the article.[16] It was – and still is - common practice for scientific articles to include notes of thanks to colleagues whose collaboration or feedback had proven instrumental for the research and writing process. But Spencer’s colleagues were aghast to see their own names as well as the names of the colleges from which the control group had been drawn printed in an article on what was still a heavily stigmatized subject. They did not wish for themselves or their collaborators to be publicly associated with research on homosexuality.

[IMG 4: Warneford and Parks Hospital Management Committee]

[Image description: The notes of the Warneford and Parks Hospital Management Committee’s meeting of July 8, 1959 reveal how irritated Spencer’s colleagues were about the publication of his article. Source: Richard Creed Papers, Rubenstein Library, Duke University]

Where Spencer’s colleagues sought to protect their own reputation in the wake of the publication, the university and hospital administrations sought to defend their institutions’ public standing. The university administration swiftly joined its medical staff in condemning Spencer’s article. Sir Maurice Bowra, the Warden of Wadham College publicly denied the accuracy of the Daily Express’ claims. ‘Absolute rubbish! It’s very hard to tell what the proportion of homosexuality [at Oxford] is,’ Bowra responded to the tabloid’s query before adding, ‘but my guess is that it is jolly small.’[17] The Warneford Hospital management likewise resented the article’s publication. It sought to alleviate the fallout and prevent future scandals by successfully pressuring the medical journal not to continue publishing the article ‘in its present form.’[18] It also asked the editors to change their editorial policy and to seek approval in the future before it printed the names of any hospitals and researchers in ‘such articles.’[19]

Faced with such an avalanche of critique, Spencer decided to ‘apologize fully and sincerely’ to his colleagues as well as the hospital and university administrations.[20] He expressed regret that his academic work aimed ‘to my fellow psychiatric readers’ had seen ‘such ruthless and sensational extrapolations’ in ‘the gutter press’. It had ‘in no way [been] intended for popular consumption,’ Spencer assured his colleagues and superiors.[21] In mentioning his collaborators’ names, his target had been merely to give credit where it was due. Spencer was also keen to play his part in preventing future such cases of ‘wanton extraction from specialist journals to pander to popular sensationalism.’[22] For this purpose, he offered to bring his experiences to the attention of British Medical Association’s ethical committee and ask for its support.[23]

While the voices of the Oxford researchers, hospital and university administrators are all preserved in the archives, the views of two particularly affected groups - the student participants and the wider student body - have proven very difficult to recover. Research in the Magdalene and St Catherine College archives and Oxford student magazines has failed to reveal any evidence of the participants’ or other students’ views on the study’s sensational news coverage. Multiple factors combine to explain this absence. One reason lies with how college archive have historically not made the documentation of student lives a priority. But there are grounds to assume that students may not have left many written traces of their views in the first place. For one, they were disincentivized from discussing the study in public by homosexuality’s continued stigmatization. The study participants especially may have feared becoming tainted as homosexuals. In the late 1950s, even confident homosexual students still sent their letters and articles to Oxford student magazines anonymously.[24] Another principal reason relates to timing. Both Spencer’s and the Daily Express article were published in July when students and their magazines were in recess. By the time that students returned in October, the summer scandal was old news, even as student conversations on homosexuality and student mental health ran on.

Conversations on the mental health of LGBT students continue to this day, albeit often in a different shape than they did in the 1950s. Thanks to gay liberationist efforts in the late 1960s and 1970, those of the Oxford group’s patients who only expressed homosexual interests would no longer be perceived as ill and sent to be treated and cured by medical specialists.[25] However, we can also see eerie parallels to the 1950s, particularly for trans students. Spencer noted that some of his patients showed a desire to act in feminine ways and be treated as women – what he referred to as ‘feminine interests in males.’[26] His judgement that this group manifested a higher ‘degree’ of mental illness than his other homosexual patients anticipated the much slower process of depathologization of trans than gay lives.[27] Only in 2019 did the World Health Organization finally cease to classify trans experiences of gender incongruence as a mental illness – nineteen years after it had done the same for homosexuality.[28] Trans exclusionary attacks continue to perpetuate pernicious stereotypes of transness as a mental illness to this day.[29]

In the meantime, Oxford trans students have drawn attention to the great toll personal and instutional transphobia has taken on their mental health. In 2018, the Oxford Student Union’s LGBTQ+ Campaign’s published its Trans Report that ‘presented an extremely concerning picture of the mental health of transgender people at the University of Oxford.’[30] Sixty years after the Oxford group’s research had sought to draw public attention to what they perceived as a wider emergency in student mental health, the Trans Report made the case that its findings ‘are evidence of a mental health crisis in the transgender community at the University of Oxford.’[31]

[IMG 6]

[Image description: The campaign’s 2018 Trans Report can be downloaded here.]