THE STORY OF NINETEENTII-CENTURY SCIENCE 



sive the chain was so short that the wretched victim 

 could not rise to the upright posture, or even shift his 

 position upon his squalid pallet of straw. 



In America, indeed, there being no Middle Age prece- 

 dents to crystallize into established customs, the treat- 

 ment accorded the insane had seldom or never sunk to 

 this level. Partly for this reason, perhaps, the work of 

 Dr. Rush, at the Philadelphia Hospital, in 1784, by 

 means of which the insane came to be humanely treat- 

 ed, even to the extent of banishing the lash, has been 

 but little noted, while the work of the European lead- 

 ers, though belonging to later decades, has been made 

 famous. And perhaps this is not as unjust as it seems, 

 for the step which Rush took, from relatively bad to 

 good, was a far easier one to take than the leap from 

 atrocities to good treatment which the European re- 

 formers were obliged to compass. In Paris, for exam- 

 ple, Pinel was obliged to ask permission of the authori- 

 ties even to make the attempt at liberating the insane 

 from their chains, and notwithstanding his recognized 

 position as a leader of science, he gained but grudging 

 assent, and was regarded as being himself little better 

 than a lunatic for making so manifestly unwise and 

 hopeless an attempt. Once the attempt had been made, 

 however, and carried to a successful issue, the amelio- 

 ration wrought in the condition of the insane was so 

 patent that the fame of Pinel's work at the Bicetre and 

 the Salpetriere went abroad apace. It required, indeed, 

 many years to complete it in Paris, and a lifetime of 

 effort on the part of Pinel's pupil Esquirol and others 

 to extend the reform to the provinces ; but the epochal 

 turning-point had been reached with Pinel's labors of 

 the closing years of the eighteenth century. 



396 



