Henry Cotton

Henry Andrews Cotton was an American psychiatrist and the medical director of the New Jersey State Hospital at Trenton, in Trenton, New Jersey. During his tenure from 1907 to 1930, Cotton and his staff employed experimental surgery and bacteriology techniques on patients, which included the routine removal of some or all of patients' teeth, tonsils, spleens, colons, ovaries, and other organs. These pseudoscientific practices persisted even after statistical reviews disproved Cotton's claims of high cure rates and revealed high mortality rates as a result of these procedures.