Nidhi Das - 1114369

The Establishment of Early Asylums and Shrines

From the sixteenth century on, special institutions called asylums, sanctuaries or places of refuge meant solely for the care of mentally ill, grew in number. The story of the rise of the lunatic asylum and its gradual transformation into, and eventual replacement by, The modern psychiatric hospital, is also the story of the rise of organized, institutional psychiatry. The first hospital established in Europe was probably in Spain in 1409-- the Valencia mental hospital founded by Father Juan Pilberto Jofre (Villasante, 2003)- although this point has been the subject of considerable discussion (Polo, 1997; Trope, 1997). Other institutions for the insane were established after the Christian Reconquista, including hospitals in Valencia (1407), Zaragoza (1425), Seville (1436), Barcelona (1481), and Toledo (1483).  The Priory of Saint Mary of Bethlehem, which later became known more notoriously as Bedlam, was founded in 1247. At the start of the fifteenth century it housed just six insane men. The former lunatic asylum Het Dolhuys from the 16th century in Haarlem, the Netherlands is now a museum of psychiatry with an overview of treatments from the origins of the building up to the 1990s. These asylums were primarily modifications of penal institutions, and the inmates are treated more like beasts than like human beings. The Public Hospital in Williamsburg, Virginia, constructed in 1773, was the first hospital in the United States devoted exclusively to mental patients. Zwelling's 1985 review of the  Public Hospital's treatment methods shows that the philosophy of treatment involved the belief that the patients needed to choose rationality over insanity, thus the treatment techniques were aggressive , aimed at restoring a "physical balance in the body and brain".