propriate.

A hundred and fifty years ago the only institutions on this side of the
Atlantic which cared for mental diseases were the Pennsylvania Hospital,
chartered in 1751, a private general hospital which had accommodations
for a few mental cases, and the Eastern State Hospital for the insane,
at Williamsburg, Virginia, a public institution incorporated in 1768. No
other one of the thirteen Colonies had a hospital of any kind, general
or special. With a view of remedying this deplorable lack in New York,
steps were taken in 1769 to establish an adequate general hospital in
the City of New York. This resulted in the grant, on June 11, 1771, of
the Royal Charter of The Society of the New York Hospital. Soon
afterward the construction of the Hospital buildings began on a spacious
tract on lower Broadway opposite Pearl Street, in which provision was
also to be made for mental cases; but before any patients could be
admitted, an accidental fire, in February, 1775, consumed the interior
of the buildings. Reconstruction was immediately undertaken and
completed early in the spring of 1776. But by that time the
Revolutionary War was in full course, and the buildings were taken over
by the Continental authorities as barracks for troops, and were
surrounded by fortifications. When the British captured the city in
September, 1776, they made the same use of the buildings for their own
troops, who remained there until 1783. A long period of readjustment
then ensued, and it was not until January, 1791, that the Hospital was
at last opened to patients. In September, 1792, the Governors directed
the admission of the first mental case, and for the hundred and
twenty-nine years since that time the Society has continuously devoted a
part of its effort to the care of the mentally diseased. After a few
years a separate building for them was deemed desirable, and was
constructed. The State assisted this expansion of the Hospital by
appropriating to the Society $12,500 a year for fifty years. This new
building housed comfortably seventy-five patients, but ten years later
even this proved inadequate in size and undesirable in surroundings. In
the meanwhile a wave of reform in the care of the insane was rising in
Europe under the influence of such benefactors as Philippe Pinel in
France, and William and Samuel Tuke in England. Thomas Eddy, a
philanthropic Quaker Governor of the Society, who was then its Treasurer
and afterward in succession