ABSTRACT
The history of psychiatric hospitalization in the United States dates formally to 1750 when the first hospital unit dedicated specifically to mental patients was opened at the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. The groundwork for the humane institutional treatment of the mentally ill had been laid in Europe in the late eighteenth century by pioneers such as Philippe Pinel at the Hospital of Bicêtre in Paris, Vizcenzo Chiarugi at the Hospital of Bonafaccio in Florence, and William Tuke at the York Retreat in England, each of whom took steps to introduce humanitarian approaches to the treatment of the mentally ill. The Friends Asylum at Frankford, Pennsylvania, the Bloomingdale Asylum in New York, the McLean Asylum in Charlestown, Massachusetts, and the Hartford Retreat (later, The Institute of Living), in Hartford, Connecticut, were all privately supported hospitals that opened in the early nineteenth century. By 1861, fortyeight asylums were in operation in the United States with a census of 8500 patients (Katz 1989).
