This building in central London once housed the Royal Waterloo Hospital a branch of the internationally renowned St Thomas' Hospital.
In the 1960s and early 1970s an unknown number of mentally ill young women were subjected to prolonged experimental treatment in the Narcosis Room on Ward 5 at the Royal Waterloo.
They were drugged with barbiturates to keep them asleep for months on end and given electric shock treatment at many times the frequency and intensity generally used on psychiatric patients. They had not been sectioned under the Mental Health Act and all this was done to them without their consent. None of them knew that this was an experimental treatment.
Some patients died here and others suffered catastrophic memory loss.
