Eliot Slater

Eliot Trevor Oakeshott Slater MD (1904 – 15 May, 1983 ), a British psychiatrist and eugenicist who developed theories of a genetic basis for mental disorders.

Slater was a student of Dr. Ernst Rüdin, one of the architects of racial hygiene policies in Nazi Germany, and was a Rockefeller Fellow in 1934-35. He returned to practise at the Maudsley Hospital, London where he founded the MRC Psychiatric Genetic Research Unit in 1959, remaining as director of the unit until 1965. He was a Vice President or Council member of the Eugenics Society (England) almost continuously between 1944 and 1978.

In 1944 Slater collaborated with William Sargant in writing An Introduction to Physical Methods of Treatment in Psychiatry, a standard textbook on biological psychiatry that included lobotomy and shock therapy and remained in print for three decades.