Pennsylvania Hospital History

In these early American years, the Quaker people were known for being more socially adept and caring than the rest of America. They were the first people to integrate mental health into the welfare of their society. However, they did not treat sufferers of mental illnesses tenderly. They housed patients in the basement of the Pennsylvania Hospital which had a meager patient capacity. The few patients that were treated there were often shackled to walls. Pennsylvania Hospital eventually expanded to become its own facility, the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane. Although the Quakers administered cruel treatment, their work was a crucial step in the founding of more mental health facilities in America (Ozarin). However, they hired a Quaker
surgeon, Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride, to head the institute in the hospital, and he was a believer in moral treatment-the concept of creating a nurturing, homelike, and respectful environment for the insane-of his patients. In Kirkbride’s hospital, the rich and the poor were treated with the same respect, and he believed that the patients would exhibit better behavior if they were not held in such a restricting environment. Although only an approximated half of his patients were able to go back into society as independently functioning citizens, that was still an amazing feat for that time since medications and treatments were not readily available (“Pennsylvania Hospital History…”). Dr. Kirkbride was a vital component in the growth of Pennsylvania Hospital and the growth of the notion that mental illnesses were medical issues and not moral ones.
A man who played a vital role in the social, educational, and clinical aspects of psychiatry was Benjamin Rush.
Often called “The Father of Modern Psychiatry,” he composed the first textbook regarding diseases of the mind. He personally believed that the causes of mental disabilities were complications with the blood vessels in the brain (Ozarin). Unlike most people of his time, he pursued medical treatment for patients because he did not accredit their mental diseases to moral offenses. “Mental illness [must] be freed from moral stigma, and be treated with medicine rather than moralizing” (“Pennsylvania Hospital History…”). Rush’s career and medical intentions were to humanize the way that patients in the psychiatric ward were treated (“Benjamin Rush…”). These methods included, hot and cold baths, bleeding, purging, and some of his own invention: the tranquilizer chair, which was put in place of the straitjacket while still coercing the patient to complete a specific task that they would not normally do based on their psychological condition, and the gyrator which was, “based on the principle of centrifugal action to increase cerebral circulation…” (“Benjamin Rush…”). Benjamin Rush was the first man in America to put the needs of the patient first and he was the man who actually reformed the manner of which patients in mental hospitals were
nursed.