140 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLIV. No. 1126 



She was a " moral Columbiad," rather than the 

 " Moral Bully " of Dr. Holmes's aversion. 



The principal defect of early American care 

 of the insane was that it was mainly a local 

 enterprise, delegated to counties and county 

 officials, men who had " an eye single to the 

 taxpayer," whose chief aim was to establish a 

 reputation for economy as a means of securing 

 reelection to office, with the result that the 

 county asylums were practically poorhouses. 

 This has been notably the case with the so- 

 called Wisconsin system of county care of the 

 chronic insane (1881), which is the subject of 

 an able critique. State care, by which is meant 

 the proper care of all the insane in the state 

 in a suitable state-supported hospital, as dis- 

 tinguished from state support of a limited 

 number, with the rest in county almhouses, is 

 a plant of recent growth. The earliest state 

 hospitals were those at Williamsburg (1773), 

 Columbia, S. C. (1828), Worcester, Mass. 

 (1833), and TJtica, N. T. (1843). The New 

 Hampshire State Care Act did not become 

 operative until 1913. In this field, New York 

 state leads, with the institutions at Willard, 

 Binghamton, Middletown, Poughkeepsie, Buf- 

 falo, Ogdensburg, Auburn, Matteawan and 

 Dannemora. Next to Binghamton in size 

 comes the admirable Government Hospital at 

 Washington, D. C, which, under the able ad- 

 ministration of Dr. William A. White, is now 

 a community of over 4,000 persons. The psy- 

 chopathic hospital, a development of Gries- 

 inger's idea of a (university) psychiatric 

 clinic, combines the features of voluntary 

 admission, temporary detention, non-restraint 

 and continuous medical observation and 

 • treatment. Such institutions or wards now 

 exist at Albany, N. T., Ann Arbor, Boston, 

 Waverly (Mass.), Providence, White Plains 

 and Washington, D. C. The best example 

 is the recent Henry Phipps Psychiatric 

 Clinic at Baltimore, under the direction 

 of Dr. Adolph Meyer. England and France 

 have left their mark upon the architecture 

 of our earlier insane hospitals. Later insti- 

 tutions have followed the plan evolved by 

 Kirkbride for the Pennsylvania Hospital which 

 consisted essentially of a large central admin- 



istration building, with extended wings on 

 each side for the separation of the sexes. De- 

 tails were governed by the " cast iron rules " 

 of the " propositions," a set of hard and fast 

 regulations evolved by the association (1844- 

 1875) for the construction and organization of 

 asylums (Kirkbride) and the legal manage- 

 ment of the insane within them (Isaac Ray). 

 The cottage plan and the farm colony are later 

 developments. Of the Buffalo State Hospital, 

 the most extreme example of the old Kirk- 

 bride plan, Dr. Hurd says that " the medical 

 officers must walk a distance of half a mile 

 from the administration building to reach the 

 farthest ward on either side," which suggests 

 the flatboatmen on the Potomac River, who, in 

 poling their craft, walk just twice the distance 

 they travel. 



Dr. Hurd modestly regards this work as a 

 source-book for the historians of the future, 

 but it is undoubtedly a permanent history, 

 which may be extended but will hardly be du- 

 plicated. The chapters are complete in them- 

 selves, the book is well-illustrated and the 

 style is charming in its simplicity, sobriety and 

 its traces of delicate humor. A complete index 

 to the whole work, which may be expected at 

 the end of the fourth volume, will make it in- 

 valuable for ready reference. 



P. H. Garrison 



Army Medical Museum 



PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL 

 ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 



The fifth number of Volume 2 of the Pro- 

 ceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 

 contains the following articles: 

 1. Differential Equations and Implicit Func- 

 tions in Infinitely many Variables: William 

 L. Hart, Department of Mathematics, Uni- 

 versity of Chicago. 



Three problems are handled: First, Certain 

 fundamental theorems concerning a type of 

 real-valued functions of infinitely many real 

 variables. Second, The problem of infinite 

 systems of ordinary differential equations. 

 Third, The fundamental problem of implicit 

 function theory in this field. 



