The NY Times recently reported on “A New Tool in Treating Mental Illness: Building Design.”1 Looking at a couple of mental health facilities in California, one recently completed and one still under construction, the article highlights some of the building and design innovations found at these institutions: private rooms with nice views of the outside, […]
A brief notice in the American Journal of Insanity from January 1856 highlights once again therapeutic importance of ambience especially for treating insanity: Gift to the Maryland Hospital A beautiful oil painting has been received at the Maryland Hospital for the Insane, with the following note addressed to the Medical Superintendent: Baltimore, 27th September, 1855 […]
In the afternoon of September 26, 1818, a family from Gloucester County, New Jersey arrived at Friends’ Asylum in Frankford, outside Philadelphia. They had brought their relative, a 26-year-old woman, fifteen miles from Woodbury to the asylum because she was suffering “in a violent state of insanity.” They hoped the asylum would be able to […]
On May 20, 1817, five days after the Friends’ Asylum opened, a woman in her late 40s, who had been suffering from melancholy for 11 years was admitted to the asylum as Patient #1.[1] Neither the superintendent nor the attending physician noted who brought her. The superintendent noted, briefly: [Patient #1] was brought this Afternoon […]
On June 1, 1824, Patient #144 was admitted to the Friends’ Asylum for the Relief of Persons Deprived of the Use of Their Reason. She was 53, married, and had been suffering for a number of years. Her admission documents—the physician’s certificate that guaranteed she was insane and her application for admission—survive along with thousands […]
Over the first two decades the Friends’ Asylum admitted 540 patients. Fortunately, very good records survive—in the form of an Admissions Book, other admissions and discharge documents, Superintendent’s Daybook, and Medical Casebooks—that allow us to reconstruct what types of patients were at the Asylum, what forms of insanity staff at the Asylum recognized, where patients […]
On May 15, 1817 the Friends’ Asylum for the Relief of Persons Deprived of the Use of their Reason opened its doors to patients. Over the previous three and a half years the board of local, influential Philadelphia Quakers had raised money to purchase land, had overseen the design and fabrication of every aspect of […]