Orders, Decorations and Medals

Honourable East India Company Medal for Seringapatam 1799, silver-gilt, 48mm., Soho Mint (From the East India Company to Valentine Conolly) naming inscribed on the edge in contemporary serif capitals, fitted with small ring for suspension, good very fine £1500-2000

Valentine Conolly was appointed Assistant Surgeon in the Madras Medical Service on 16 June 1788 and Surgeon on 1 June 1796. He took part in the Fourth Mysore War and was present at the capture of Seringapatam in 1799.

Conolly founded the Madras Lunatic Asylum in 1793 and set in train both a lucrative business and a procedure for the disposal of insane persons, which was regarded as most humane and judicious by the authorities. The accounts praising Conolly’s achievements are divided between mentions of personal profit on the one hand and public benevolence on the other. He retired in February 1803 and on his return to England he had accumulated great wealth and was acknowledged as one of those formerly less well-off Englishmen who returned from India as wealthy nabobs. He settled down in London, comfortably seeing his five sons through education in prestigious colleges and thus preparing them for promising careers - as military officers and members of the civil service in India. Before embarkation Conolly had sold the asylum buildings for three times the premises’ estimated value to another medical practitioner who expected the asylum to be a good enough income source to enable him to imitate his predecessor’s rise to fortune. Valentine Conolly died in London on 2 December 1819.