History

The MCA came into being on 20th April 1967 when 50 founder members met at the BMA to elect officers and discuss future policy. Sir Clement Price Thomas was the first chair of the organisation. In his opening speech he said, “there had been ample evidence of an urgent need for a representative medical body to concern itself with the problems of alcoholism”.

Max Meier Glatt was born to a middle-class Jewish family in Berlin in 1912. He embarked on an academic medical career but the anti-semitic laws of the time led to his expulsion from the University of Berlin. In 1936 against considerable political adversity he obtained a doctorate on cerebral syphilis from the University of Leipzig, with the support of Karl Bonhoeffer, professor of psychiatry at the Charité Hospital in Berlin.

After Kristallnacht in November 1938, Max was arrested whilst trying to escape to Holland and taken to Dachau. He was released the following February and managed to get to England. His parents were not so fortunate and died in a concentration camp. His sister was the only other member of his family to survive. After arrival in England, like others in his situation, he was identified as a potential enemy alien and detained at the beginning of the war then sent to Australia for three years.

His UK career began on his return to England in 1942 when he
entered hospital psychiatric practice. From the start his interest was
in the treatment of alcohol and drug addicts. He saw these patients
as an excluded, stigmatised group. In 1952 he set up the first NHS
alcohol treatment unit at Warlingham Park Hospital in Croydon. In
the years that followed his influence expanded. In the 1950s his unit
was visited by Mary Mann, the founder and Director of the American National Council on Alcoholism and by Jellinek, the leading American scholar on alcoholism. Max Glatt was committed to the disease concept of al- coholism and to group therapy as the preferred treatment. In 1955 he published a seminal article in the Lancet, showing that alcoholic patients could be cooperative, responsive to group therapy and stable when sober. Max Glatt was also closely involved with Alcoholics Anonymous.

At the end of the 1950s he moved to St Bernard’s Hospital in west London where he set up a unit for alcohol and drug addicted patients, again run on group therapy principles; which later became the Max Glatt Centre. There followed a number of similar units in the NHS and the private sector. Notably, Max Glatt set up the first such unit for the treatment of alcoholics in the prison service, in Wormwood Scrubs. Academic and professional achievements followed. In 1962 he became a member of the WHO Expert Committee on Drug Dependence. He advised the BMA, the Home Office, the Royal Colleges and others. He received many honours, from the UK and internationally, including the Jellinek prize, the prestigious award for addiction. Under his editorship, the journal of the Society for Addiction, Addiction, became a leading international journal in the field.

Max Glatt was a founding member of the Medical Council on Alcoholism and of the National Council on Alco- holism, a precursor of Alcohol Concern. He noted that doctors and dentists amongst his patients had difficul- ty attending AA meetings where they might meet their own patients. This led to the founding in 1973 of the British Doctors and Dentists Group.

Max Glatt was a quiet, gentle and modest person and universally liked and admired, with an enormous capacity for hard work. He retired from the NHS in 1979 but he continued very actively in private practice and in prison work until his death in 2002.