High walls kept things dark for years, but the light stole through in the end, as it always will.[734] In 1793 Pinel removed the chains from patients in the Bicêtre. At home, the York Asylum, already alluded to, began to bear an evil reputation. In 1788 it incurred the _Animadversions_[735] of the Rev. William Mason.[736] In the year 1791 some friends of a female patient desired to visit her, but were not allowed, upon the plea that she was not in a suitable condition to be seen by strangers (she probably was not!) A few weeks after this she was reported dead.[737] The woman belonged to the Society of Friends, and the suspicious circumstances of her incarceration caused much resentment among the Quakers. Soon after, William Tuke resolved that they should have a hospital of their own. The Retreat was started in the year 1792, and its humane and enlightened methods were soon contrasted with the barbarous and secret administration prevailing at the older institution. But the years rolled by while patients languished and died. It was in 1813 that Samuel Tuke—a grandson of the founder of the Retreat—brought out a little work[738] describing the system there. It “excited universal interest, and, in fact, achieved what all the talents and public spirit of Mason and his friends had failed to accomplish. It had still better effects. A very inoffensive passage in this book roused, it seems, the animosity of the physician to York Lunatic Asylum, and a letter which this gentleman published in one of the York newspapers[739] became the origin of a controversy among the governors of that establishment, which terminated in August 1814, after a struggle of nearly two years, in the complete overthrow of the old system, and the dismission of every officer of the asylum, except the physician himself.”[740]