perhaps of interest to M&D readers

[Doug Millison]

http://hnn.us/articles/117164.html

10-05-09

The Madhouse of Colonial Williamsburg: An Interview With Shomer  
ZwellingBy Priscilla Hart
Ms. Hart is an award-winning journalist who has covered international  
affairs and historical topics in her writing. On a recent trip to  
colonial Williamsburg she visited the reconstructed site of America's  
first psychiatric hospital. Her story about the hospital was recently  
published in the U.K. A related piece will soon be published in a  
major American newspaper.

Chartered in 1770, Williamsburg's "Publick Hospital" was established  
"for the support and maintenance of Ideots, Lunaticks, and other  
Persons of unsound Minds" who threatened colonial society. The  
hospital hoped to restore its patients to their mental health -- or  
"reason," according to Enlightenment terminology -- and to provide a  
therapeutic environment for mentally ill individuals who had been  
placed in colonial jails or left unattended by their families. The 24- 
patient facility was erected a short half-mile walk from the colonial  
city's Capitol building where George Washington and Thomas Jefferson  
cast their revolutionary votes in Virginia's House of Burgesses. It  
opened in 1773. In 1885, with 400 patients in its care, the hospital  
burned mysteriously to the ground. In the centenary year of its  
destruction, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation reconstructed the  
facility, which now houses a section of the original hospital as well  
as two collections of colonial arts and antiques. … …