James King Hall (1875-1948) of Iredell County, N.C., was a psychiatrist who specialized in mental illness and co-founder and director of the Westbrook Sanitorium in Richmond, Va., 1911-1948. The collection contains the professional correspondence and medical writings, chiefly 1920-1948, of James King Hall and include correspondence with friends and colleagues in the medical profession, mainly in North Carolina and Virginia; items related to psychiatry and its institutions and organizations, including the Tri-State Medical Association of the Carolinas and Virginia and the American Psychiatric Association; letters from political leaders of North Carolina and Virginia concerning state mental institutions; correspondence with doctors and others, including Judge Horace W. Fitch, concerning Hall's interst in the relation of crime and mental illness; and papers regarding genealogy and the history of Iredell County, N.C. Early papers are of Hall and Nisbet ancestors in Iredell County, including correspondence, financial, and legal documents of Hugh Roddy Hall (1800-1856); records of the Bethany congregation (Presbyterian), 1775-1872; a physician's day book, 1867-1871; and records of the Ebenezer Academy, an Iredell County school operated by Hugh Roddy Hall. Also included are clippings pictures, scrapbooks, notebooks, and an inspection report of a Confederate medical purveyor's depot, 1864.
