COMMUNICATIONS FROM DR. BEDFORD PIERCE, MEDICAL SUPERINTENDENT OF THE RETREAT, YORK, ENGLAND
May 5th, 1921.
Dear Dr. Russell:
I have read with much pleasure your pamphlet giving the history of Bloomingdale Hospital. The reproduction in facsimile of Thomas Eddy's communication[[20]] is especially interesting and it will be placed with the records of the early days of the Retreat.
We have looked through the Minutes, which are complete from the opening of the Retreat in 1796, and also examined a large number of original letters of William and Samuel Tuke respecting the Institution, but have not succeeded in tracing the letter from S. Tuke to William Eddy, to which you refer. As you are probably aware, S. Tuke was the grandson of William Tuke, the founder, and when he published the History of the Retreat in 1812 he was but twenty-eight years of age. This book had a far-reaching influence on the treatment of the insane, and it is remarkable that a man untrained in medicine and without university education should have been able to write it. The book is now very rare, but as we have three duplicate copies, I am authorized by the Directors of the Retreat to present your Hospital with one of them. I have already sent you a copy of an address of my own dealing with Psychiatry in England at about the time your Hospital was instituted.
The use of the term "moral treatment" as opposed to treatment of physical disease has in recent years become especially interesting. It is clear that Tuke and Pinel foresaw that psychotherapeutic treatment is necessary, and their efforts were directed towards providing effective "sublimation" of misdirected psychical energy.
One is pleased to see in your report the extent to which organized occupations are developed at Bloomingdale—a pleasure not unmixed with envy at seeing the picture of the men's occupational pavilion, and the prospective erection of a similar building for women.
In the early days of the Retreat large numbers of visitors came from all parts of the world. There is a gap in the Visitors' Book between 1800-1815, and the list of visitors is not complete.
We have copied out the names of the American Visitors, together with an entry by John W. Francis, M.D., in 1815. It is interesting to note that an American woman Friend, Hannah Field, was accompanied to the Retreat by Elizabeth Fry. In 1818 a party of North American Indians visited the Retreat and signed the Visitors' Book with pictorial representations of their names. These we have had photographed and I send the prints herewith.
May I congratulate you on the centenary of your Hospital and also congratulate you and the Governors on its remarkable development and progress. Here at the Retreat we carry on using the original buildings still, striving to give our patients modern treatment in premises now almost ancient, but which do not appear so out of date in this City of York. York congratulates New York upon its wonderful prosperity, and we gladly recognize its development in the practice of psychiatry fully corresponds with its development in other directions.
I remain,
Yours sincerely,
Bedford Pierce.