To review the past is, at a time like this, not unprofitable. It may prevent us, in our zeal for the new, from discarding what is valuable in the old, and from overvaluing some things which may have outlived their usefulness. We must be careful that we do not fall into errors similar to those from which the medical profession was rescued by the movement of which Bloomingdale Asylum was an offspring. It should be recalled that the establishment of the asylum was due to the initiative of the Governors of the New York Hospital, especially Mr. Eddy, rather than to the active interest and direction of physicians. The object of the establishment was, according to Mr. Eddy, to afford an opportunity of ascertaining how far insanity may be relieved by moral treatment alone, which, he says, "it is believed, will, in many instances, be more effective in controlling the maniacs than medical treatment." The moral management he referred to, though advocated by Pinel and a few others, some of whom were benevolent and intelligent laymen, had not been accepted by physicians as a distinct form of medical treatment. Few physicians of the period had accepted management of the mind as described and practised by Pinel as being a distinct medical procedure, as having the same value in overcoming mental disorders as the drastic medical remedies which they were accustomed to employ, or as having any exclusive healing power. This is clearly shown by the case records of the mental department of the New York Hospital which have been preserved since 1817, and of those of Bloomingdale Asylum for some years after its opening in 1821. It is plainly set forth in Dr. Rush's book on diseases of the mind, which was first published in 1810 and again in a fourth edition in 1830. Rush was physician to the Pennsylvania Hospital and his book was the principal, if not the only, one of the period by an American author. American physicians like their European brothers, had, as Pinel observes, "allowed themselves to be confined within the fairy circle of antiphlogisticism, and by that means to be deviated from the more important management of the mind." Rush believed that madness was a disease of the blood-vessels of the brain of the same nature as fever, of which it was a chronic form. "There is," he says, "not a single symptom that takes place in an ordinary fever, except a hot skin, that does not occur in an acute attack of madness." He found in his autopsy observations confirmation of this view and concludes that "madness is to phrenitis what pulmonary consumption is to pneumony, that is, a chronic state of an acute disease." The reason for believing that madness was a disease of the blood-vessels, which seemed to him most conclusive, was "from the remedies which most speedily and certainly cure it being exactly the same as those which cure fever or disease in the blood-vessels from other causes and in other parts of the body." The