ABSTRACT
Health services in all countries, whether developed or developing, have ostensibly similar aims. They are intended to promote health, to postpone mortality and to prevent disability as far as possible. The Lunatics Acts of 1845 had been chiefly concerned with the welfare of the mentally sick individual in need of protection from exploitation and physical ill-treatment. There has long been an emphasis on social and preventive factors in the provision of medical services in the Soviet Union and even in prerevolutionary times there was an early form of district service, with case registration and an emphasis on after-care. The social security programme introduced in Lenin's time provided pensions for the disabled and laid great stress on help to achieve full working capacity. During the nineteenth century, when the political philosophies of the United States and United Kingdom were approximately the same, the development of a mental hospital system followed similar lines in both the countries.
