Happily, the most characteristic mark of distinction between the last hundred years and the centuries which preceded them lies in the rapidity with which new ideas, even the most revolutionary, spread, provided only they can justify themselves before the tribunal of reason. Such proved true of the startling innovation wrought by Pinel and Tuke. By 1838, Dr. Gardner Hill, house surgeon of Lincoln Asylum, England, ably seconded by Dr. Charlesworth, had asserted the principle of the entire abolition of mechanical restraint, and had to a very large extent carried it out, though personally falling a victim to the bitter opposition he encountered alike from commissioners and his own medical brethren. But immediately followed the remarkable career of Dr. John Conolly, who at Hanwell, on a much larger scale and with far greater success, came to the rescue of the

cause.

"To Conolly," says the "Edinburgh Review," April, 1870, "belongs a still higher crown, not merely for his courage in carrying out a beneficent conception on a large scale and on a conspicuous theatre, but for his genius in expanding it. To him, hobbles and chains, handcuffs and muffs, were but material impediments that merely confined the limbs; to get rid of these he spent the best years of his life; but beyond these mechanical fetters he saw there were a hundred fetters to the spirit, which human sympathy, courage, and time only could remove."

The dire instruments of coercion formerly in constant use Dr. Conolly remanded to a room in the asylum, and there constituted a museum of them, a Chamber of Horrors, which the enlightened physician of to-day contemplates with practically the same feel

ings which would be excited in him by a visit to the old dungeons and instruments of torture of the inquisition. And yet, so recently had the possibility of such a change been dreamed of that Dr. Conolly relates that he himself had formerly witnessed "humane English physicians daily contemplating insane patients bound hand and foot, and neck and waist, in illness, in pain, and in the agonies of death, without one single touch of compunction, or the slightest approach to the feeling of acting either cruelly or unwisely. They thought it impossible to manage insane people in any other way." 1

Is it, then, exaggeration to characterize the absolute change of base inaugurated by the labors of Pinel and Tuke as a Copernican revolution in the realm of the theory and treatment of insanity?

The beginning of the nineteenth century saw in the whole United States but four insane asylums, of which one only had been entirely built by a State government. They were, in the order of the dates of their foundation, those of Philadelphia, Penn., 1752; of Williamsburg, Va. (the first State asylum), 1773; of New York, 1791; of Baltimore, Md., 1797. In

1 "After five years' experience," wrote Dr. Conolly, "I have no hesitation in recording my opinion that, with a well-constituted governing body, animated by philanthropy, directed by intelligence, and acting by means of proper officers (entrusted with a due degree of authority over attendants, properly selected, and capable of exercising an efficient superintendence over patients), there is no asylum in the world in which all mechanical restraint may not be abolished, not only with perfect safety, but with incalculable advantage." (Tuke's History of the Insane in the British Isles.) It may be that this is too ideal a statement of what is possible under any but the rarest combination of circumstances. Dr. Conolly was a man of positive genius in his calling, and of a magnetism and spirit of consecration that carried all before him. At any rate, it was in the right direction.

1813, attention was attracted to Tuke's work in England by certain Philadelphia Friends, who, collecting funds, opened in 1817 a hospital in which the insane might see that they were "regarded as men and breth

ren."

One year later witnessed the foundation of the McLean Asylum at Somerville, Mass., -the asylum which "established the character and principles of treatment which have become universal with us, and especially the principle of State supervision." Later on, "The Retreat" at Hartford, Conn., opened in 1824, and the asylum at Worcester, Mass., in 1830, became conspicuous examples of the practical application of the new scientific and humane ideas inaugurated by Pinel and Tuke.

"There were giants on the earth in those days," says, in his paper on "Progress in Provision for the Insane," Dr. W. W. Godding, of the Government Insane Asylum for the Army and Navy in Washington, D. C. Dr. Godding had been speaking of the memorable list of men in the United States who at that early date had already been attracted by genius and character to the development of the new system; Brigham, Butler, Woodward, Ray, Walker, Bell, Stribling, Grey, Kirkbride. Here, enlisted with consecrated intelligence and humanity under the new banner, was a chosen band, who were destined before very long to carry the fame of American asylums all over Europe, and, for a time at least, to keep them ahead of any in the world.

None the less, one indispensable spiritual power in the land was still lacking. It was that of a fervid apostle of the new creed; of one animated with the requisite inspiration and fire to lead a crusade against the almost universal ignorance, superstition, and apa

thy which still reigned over nearly the whole of the States of the Union; of a mind and heart, in fine, powerful enough to rally thousands and tens of thousands to the deliverance from the hand of the infidel of what should seem to her no less than the Holy Sepulchre of crucified humanity. This imperative demand was now to be answered in the person of Dorothea Lynde Dix.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE DESCENT INTO INFERNO.

It was on March 28, 1841, that Miss Dix was first brought face to face with the condition of things prevailing in the jails and almshouses of Massachusetts, which launched her on her great career. The story, repeated in so many scattered notices of her life, runs that, on coming out of church one Sunday, she overheard two gentlemen speaking in such terms of indignation and horror of the treatment to which the prisoners and lunatics in the East Cambridge, Massachusetts, jail were subjected that she forthwith determined to go over there and look into matters herself. The occurrence of the incident is perfectly possible; but the important fact of the case is given in the following extract from a letter of Rev. John T. G. Nichols, D. D., of Saco, Maine :

"While a member, of the theological school in Cambridge [writes Dr. Nichols], I was one of a body of students who took the East Cambridge house of correction in charge for Sunday-school instruction. All the women, twenty in number, were assigned to me. I was at once convinced that, not a young man, but a woman should be their teacher. Consulting my mother, I was directed by her to Miss Dix for further counsel. On hearing my account, Miss Dix said, after some deliberation, I will take them myself!' I protested her physical incapacity, as she was in feeble health. I shall be there next Sunday,' was her answer. "After the school was over, Miss Dix went into the jail.