Upon this truth Inebriate Asylums are founded; their object being to
afford the help needed. There are now four such institutions in the
United States: one in Boston, opened in 1857, called the Washingtonian
Home; one in Media, near Philadelphia, opened in 1867, called the
Sanitarium; one at Chicago, opened in 1868; and one at Binghamton, New
York, called the New York Inebriate Asylum. The one last named was
founded in 1858, if the laying of the corner-stone with grand
ceremonial can be called founding it; and it has been opened some years
for the reception of patients; but it had no real existence as an
asylum for the cure of inebriates until the year 1867, when the present
superintendent, Dr. Albert Day, assumed control.
The history of the institution previous to that time ought to be
related fully for the warning of a preoccupied and subscribing public,
but space cannot be afforded for it here. The substance of it, as
developed in sundry reports of trials and pamphlets of testimony, is
this: Fifteen or twenty years ago, an English adventurer living in the
city of New York, calling himself a doctor, and professing to treat
unnamable diseases, thought he saw in this notion of an Inebriate
Asylum (then much spoken of) a chance for feathering his nest. He
entered upon the enterprise without delay, and he displayed a good deal
of nervous energy in getting the charter, collecting money, and
erecting the building. The people of Binghamton, misled by his
representations, gave a farm of two hundred and fifty-two acres for the
future inmates to cultivate, which was two hundred acres too much; and
to this tract farms still more superfluous have been added, until the
Asylum estate contains more than five hundred acres. An edifice was
begun on the scale of an imperial palace, which will have cost, by the
time it is finished and furnished, a million dollars. The restless man
pervaded the State raising money, and creating public opinion in favor
of the institution. For several years he was regarded as one of the
great originating philanthropists of the age; and this the more because
he always gave out that he was laboring in the cause from pure love of
the inebriate, and received no compensation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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