The Psychopathic Hospital in Boston, the first institution of the kind established in this country as a department of a state hospital (The Psychopathic Department of the Boston State Hospital), was opened for the reception of patients in 1912. The purposes of the institution were very clearly shown by the Twelfth Annual Report of the Massachusetts State Board of Insanity (1910):—"The psychopathic hospital should receive all classes of mental patients for first care, examination and observation, and provide short, intensive treatment of incipient, acute and curable insanity. Its capacity should be small, not exceeding such requirement. An adequate staff of physicians, investigators and trained workers in every department should provide as high a standard of efficiency as that of the best general and special hospitals, or that in any field of medical science. Ample facilities should be available for the treatment of mental and nervous conditions, the clinical study of patients on the wards, and scientific investigation in well-equipped laboratories, with a view to prevention and cure of mental disease and addition to the knowledge of insanity and associated problems. Clinical instruction should be given to medical students, the future family physicians, who would thus be taught to recognize and treat mental disease in its earliest stages, when curative measures avail most. Such a hospital, therefore, should be accessible to medical schools, other hospitals, clinics and laboratories. It should be a center of education and training of physicians, nurses, investigators, and special workers in this and allied fields of work. Its out-patient department should afford free consultation to the poor, and such advice and medical treatment as would, with the aid of district nursing, promote the home care of mental patients. Its social workers should facilitate early discharge and after care of patients, and investigate their previous history, habits, home and working conditions and environment, heredity and other causes of insanity, and endeavor to apply corrective and preventive measures."