A Psychiatric Milestone: Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921
History
A Psychiatric Milestone: Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921
Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane; Mental illness
Instead of depending on frequently changing policies regulated from the
outside under the influence of the greater and lesser lights and
exigencies of State and municipal organization, the New York Hospital
has its self-perpetuating body of Governors chosen from the most
public-spirited and thoughtful representatives of our people.
Bloomingdale thus has always had a remarkable Board of Governors, who,
from contact with the General Hospital and with this special division,
are in an unusual position to see the practical aspects of the great
change that is now taking place. You see how the division of psychiatry
has developed from practically a detention-house to an asylum, and
finally to a hospital with all the medical equipment and laboratories of
the General Hospital. And you begin to see psychiatry, with its methods
of study and management of life problems as well as of specific brain
diseases, infections, and gastrointestinal and endocrine conditions,
become more and more helpful, even a necessity, in the wards and
dispensary of the General Hospital on 16th Street. The layman cannot,
perhaps, delve profitably into the details of such a highly and broadly
specialized type of work. But he can readily take a share in the best
appreciation of the general philosophy and policy of it all.
The shaping of the policy of a semiprivate hospital is not quite as
simple as shaping that of a State Hospital with its well-defined
districts and geographically marked zones of responsibility.
Bloomingdale has its sphere of influence marked by qualitative selection
rather than by a formal consideration. It does not pose as an invidious
contrast to the State Hospital, and yet it is intended to solve in a
somewhat freer and more privileged manner the problem of providing for
the mentally sick of a more or less specific hospital constituency, the
constituency of the New York Hospital; and since it reaches the most
discriminating and thinking part of our population, it has the most
wonderful opportunity to shape public opinion. Like all psychiatrical
institutions, it has to live down the traditional notions of the
half-informed public; it has to make conspicuous the change of spirit
and the better light in which we see our field and responsibilities.
This organization can show that it is not mere insanity but the working
out of life problems that such a hospital as this is concerned with. The
conditions for which it cares are many. Some of them are all that which
tradition and law stamp as insanity. But see what a change.
Seventy-five per cent of the patients are voluntary admissions; and more
and more will be able to use the helps when they begin to feel the need,
not merely when it becomes an enforced necessity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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