48 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and sink slowly into incurable dementia. Other cases are marked from 

 the outset by the stigmata of chronicity, being slow and insidious in 

 development, and the disease is often fully established before the 

 patient's friends awake to a realization of the event. These chronic 

 classes of the insane require a specialized treatment, a home where 

 they can be protected from the world and from themselves, where con- 

 genial occupation may be obtained, where a strict but humanely 

 enforced control may be exercised over their conduct and where their 

 lives may be lived in comfort and in peace. Until recent years all 

 classes of insane have been cared for in large institutions where proper 

 classification has been difficult or impossible and where the acute and cur- 

 able cases have been in daily contact with the incurable and the demented. 



Of late much effort has been made to overcome this objectionable 

 state of thing by the establislunent of colonies, where the chronic 

 insane may live in small separated cottages scattered in groups over a 

 large tract of land. Here the patients live in small groups or families 

 under conditions more approximating home surroundings. The farm 

 and industrial shops furnish the occupation so necessary to relieve the 

 monotony of life and to counteract abnormal tendencies. The little 

 colony has its chapel and amusement hall, sometimes a store, and fur- 

 nishes an environment in which a man may live in comparative com- 

 fort and with a reasonable degree of contentment. Such colonies are 

 now quite numerous in Europe and America and seem to furnish ideal 

 conditions for the care of the chronic and presumably incurable cases. 

 In Scotland, Germany, Belgium, and to a limited extent in Massa- 

 chusetts, a system is in operation with a fair degree of success in 

 which selected chronic cases are boarded out in private families in the 

 country districts while under the observation and control of a govern- 

 mental bureau or commission. 



It is unfortunately a fact that many of the chronic insane are still 

 detained in almshouses and poor farms not only in this country but 

 abroad. Here they, Mdio are the unfortunate victims of disease and 

 not to be held responsible for their condition, are obliged to associate 

 with paupers and criminals and are kept in a condition unworthy of 

 the civilization of the twentieth century. The cruelty of a past age 

 still lingers in many of these places, and not only do they suffer from the 

 stigma of their associations, but are too often the victims of improper 

 and insufficient attendance and are not strangers to bonds and chains. 



But the grand work of emancipation is still going on, and en- 

 lightened public sentiment is everywhere at work and the realization of 

 a fuller charity is surely not long to be delayed. At the beginning of 

 the twentieth century we are on the threshold of a new era in the 

 working out of this great problem, and the scientific and philanthropic 

 spirits of the day are laboring together and energetically toward its 

 ultimate solution. 



