accomplishments to an already dignified history. The early care of mental cases in Rhode Island, as shown by a report to the legislature by Thomas R. Hazard in 1851, was perhaps no worse than that of other states, although the conditions he described so graphically have not been attributed to other New England communities by historians. The following extract from a codicil to the will of Nicholas Brown, who died in 1843, is proof of the fact that this unfortunate state of affairs had not entirely escaped notice[22]:—"And whereas it has long been deeply impressed on my mind that an insane or lunatic hospital or retreat for the insane should be established upon a firm and permanent basis, under an act of the Legislature, where that unhappy portion of our fellow beings who are, by the visitation of Providence, deprived of their reason, may find a safe retreat and be provided with whatever may be most conducive to their comfort and to their restoration to a sound state of mind: Therefore, for the purpose of aiding an object so desirable and in the hope that such an establishment may soon be commenced, I do hereby set apart and give and bequeath the sum of $30,000 towards the erection or endowment of an insane or lunatic hospital or retreat for the insane, or by whatever other name it may be called, to be located in Providence or its vicinity." Supplemental contributions by Cyrus Butler made it possible for the incorporators to found the Butler Hospital in Providence. The first patients were received on December 1, 1847. More than any other one person, Miss Dorothea L. Dix of Massachusetts was undoubtedly directly responsible for the inauguration of the state care of mental diseases in this country. She is credited with having memorialized twenty-two different state legislatures on this subject. One of her first accomplishments consisted in inducing the New Jersey legislature to make an appropriation for the establishment of the state hospital at Trenton. This institution was opened in 1848, after some of the hardest campaigning that Miss Dix conducted. The last years of her life were spent as an honored guest of the hospital and she died there in 1887 at the advanced age of eighty-five.