At eighteen young Conolly became an officer in a militia regiment, in which capacity he served several years. While still young, he married in 1816 the daughter of Sir John Collins and went to reside in France, on the banks of the Loire. A year later he had decided to enter the medical profession, and in 1817 became a student at Edinburgh University. After a diligent career, in the course of which he was one of the presidents of the Royal Medical Society, he graduated M.D., and settled in practice as a physician at Chichester. Here he became intimately acquainted with Dr. (afterwards Sir John) Forbes, with whom he was afterwards much connected in literary matters. Dr. Conolly did not remain very long at Chichester, but removed in 1823 to Stratford-on-Avon, where he wrote many contributions to and took part in editing the “Cyclopædia of Practical Medicine,” and the _British and Foreign Medical Review_. At Stratford he became alderman and mayor, established a public dispensary, and studied Shakespeare with enthusiasm. This occasioned him afterwards, while practising at Warwick in 1835, to take an active part as chairman of the committee formed for securing the preservation of Shakespeare’s tomb, and the restoration of the chancel of the church. In 1827 Dr. Conolly was appointed Professor of the Practice of Medicine in London University, which appointment he only held four years, finding life as a London physician unsuitable to his tastes. In 1831 he again resorted to the country, establishing himself in Warwick. The subject of insanity had long engaged Dr. Conolly’s attention. He had studied the question both abroad and at home, and had been for five years, (while residing at Stratford) inspecting physician to the Lunatic Houses for the County of Warwick, an office which he resumed when he settled in Warwick. He had unsuccessfully proposed to the council of the University that he should give his pupils clinical instruction on insanity in one of the lunatic asylums in London. “Thus,” says Sir James Clark,[20] “clinical instruction in mental diseases was thrown back for thirty years in this country.”