Report from the Committee appointed to Examine the Physicians who have attended His Majesty, during his illness, Touching the State of His Majesty’s Health. [bound with:] Report from the Committee appointed to Examine the Physicians who have attended His Majesty, during his illness, Touching the present State of His Majesty’s health. Ordered to be printed 13th January 1789. [bound with:] Report from the Committee appointed to Examine and Report Precedents of such Proceedings as may have been had in the Case of the Personal Exercise of the Royal Authority being prevented or interrupted by Infancy, Sickness, Infirmity, or otherwise, with a View to provide a Remedy for the same. Ordered to be printed 12th December 1788.

Norman Catalogue 889 ‘Few illnesses of historic personages have been followed so closely and documented so well as the insanity of George III ... The question of the King's recovery was of such importance that special committees from each house of Parliament were set up to interrogate the King's doctors ... These examinations ... advanced the cause of psychiatry by educating the public about mental illness and by giving an aura of respectability to the study of insanity’. See Wellcome III, p. 1254 for the re-issue in 8vo. + The second Report, this issue appearing as a parliamentary paper. Norman Catalogue 890. See Hunter & Macalpine pp. 509-514, and Hunter & Macalpine, George III and the mad business, 1969. First edition. According to Worldcat this edition only registred in 7, 6 & 2 libraries worldwide. Three works bound together. The first Report was presented to the House of Commons on 10th December 1788, and the first evidence for this Report was taken on 7th January 1789. George III suffered five attacks of a condition now thought to be porphyria, of which the best documented and the most important both politically and from the point of view of the history of psychiatry was that which lasted from October 1788 to March 1789. During that period the physicians who attended him, the most influential of whom was Francis Willis, were repeatedly summoned before Parliamentary Committees to give evidence and opinions on the King's health. One question in this present Report put to Dr. Warren, on usual recovery rates of the King's condition, resulted in one of the earliest pieces of statistical research in psychiatry, although Warren never published his findings. Bound at the end of this is a contemporary government report on the personal exercise of the royal authority.