Moral treatment

Under the Enlightened concern of Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo in Florence, Italian physician Vincenzo Chiarugi instituted humanitarian reforms. Between 1785 and 1788 he managed to outlaw chains as a means of restraint at the Santa Dorotea hospital, building on prior attempts made there since the 1750s. From 1788 at the newly renovated St. Bonifacio Hospital he did the same, and led the development of new rules establishing a more humane regime.[2]

The ex-patient Jean-Baptiste Pussin and his wife Margueritte, and the physician Philippe Pinel (1745–1826), are also recognized as the first instigators of more humane conditions in asylums. From the early 1780s, Pussin had been in charge of the mental hospital division of the La Bicêtre, an asylum in Paris for male patients.[3] From the mid-1780s, Pinel was publishing articles on links between emotions, social conditions and insanity.[4] In 1792 (formally recorded in 1793), Pinel became the chief physician at the Bicetre. Pussin showed Pinel how really knowing the patients meant they could be managed with sympathy and kindness as well as authority and control. In 1797, Pussin first freed patients of their chains and banned physical punishment, although straitjackets could be used instead.[5] Patients were allowed to move freely about the hospital grounds, and eventually dark dungeons were replaced with sunny, well-ventilated rooms. Pussin and Pinel's approach was seen as remarkably successful and they later brought similar reforms to a mental hospital in Paris for female patients, La Salpetrière. Pinel's student and successor, Jean Esquirol (1772–1840), went on to help establish 10 new mental hospitals that operated on the same principles. There was an emphasis on the selection and supervision of attendants in order to establish a suitable setting to facilitate psychological work, and particularly on the employment of ex-patients as they were thought most likely to refrain from inhumane treatment while being able to stand up to pleading, menaces, or complaining.[6]

Pinel used the term "traitement moral" for the new approach. At that time "moral", in French and internationally, had a mixed meaning of either psychological/emotional (mental) or moral (ethical). Pinel distanced himself from the more religious work that was developed by the Tukes, and in fact considered that excessive religiosity could be harmful. He sometimes took a moral stance himself, however, as to what he considered to be mentally healthy and socially appropriate.[7]

An English Quaker named William Tuke (1732–1822) independently led the development of a radical new type of institution in northern England, following the death of a fellow Quaker in a local asylum in 1790. In 1796, with the help of fellow Quakers and others, he founded the York Retreat, where eventually about 30 patients lived as part of a small community in a quiet country house and engaged in a combination of rest, talk, and manual work. Rejecting medical theories and techniques, the efforts of the York Retreat centered around minimizing restraints and cultivating rationality and moral strength. The entire Tuke family became known as founders of moral treatment.[8] They created a family-style ethos and patients performed chores to give them a sense of contribution. There was a daily routine of both work and leisure time. If patients behaved well, they were rewarded; if they behaved poorly, there was some minimal use of restraints or instilling of fear. The patients were told that treatment depended on their conduct. In this sense, the patient's moral autonomy was recognized. William Tuke's grandson, Samuel Tuke, published an influential work in the early 19th century on the methods of the retreat; Pinel's Treatise On Insanity had by then been published, and Samuel Tuke translated his term as "moral treatment".

A very different background to the moral approach may be discerned in Scotland. Interest in mental illness was a feature of the Edinburgh medical school in the eighteenth century, with influential teachers including William Cullen (1710–1790) and Robert Whytt (1714–1766) emphasising the clinical importance of psychiatric disorders. In 1816, the phrenologist Johann Spurzheim (1776–1832) visited Edinburgh and lectured on his craniological and phrenological concepts, arousing considerable hostility, not least from the theologically doctrinaire Church of Scotland. Some of the medical students, however, notably William A.F. Browne (1805–1885), responded very positively to this materialist conception of the nervous system and, by implication, of mental disorder. George Combe (1788–1858), an Edinburgh solicitor, became an unrivalled exponent of phrenological thinking, and his brother, Andrew Combe (1797–1847), who was later appointed a physician to Queen Victoria, wrote a phrenological treatise entitled Observations on Mental Derangement (1831). George and Andrew Combe exerted a rather dictatorial authority over the Edinburgh Phrenological Society, and in the mid-1820s manipulated the de facto expulsion of the Christian phrenologists.

This tradition of medical materialism found a ready partner in the Lamarckian biology purveyed by the naturalist Robert Edmond Grant (1793–1874) who exercised a striking influence on the young Charles Darwin during his time as a medical student in Edinburgh in 1826/1827. William Browne advanced his own versions of evolutionary phrenology at influential meetings of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society, the Royal Medical Society and the Plinian Society. Later, as superintendent of Sunnyside Royal Hospital (the Montrose Asylum) from 1834 to 1838, and, more extravagantly, at the Crichton Royal in Dumfries from 1838 to 1859, Browne implemented his general approach of moral management, indicating a clinical sensitivity to the social groupings, shifting symptom patterns, dreams and art-works of the patients in his care. Browne summarised his moral approach to asylum management in his book (actually the transcripts of five public lectures) which he entitled What Asylums Were, Are, and Ought To Be. His achievements with this style of psychiatric practice were rewarded with his appointment as a Commissioner in Lunacy for Scotland, and by his election to the Presidency of the Medico-Psychological Association in 1866. Browne's eldest surviving son, James Crichton-Browne (1840–1938), did much to extend his father's work in psychiatry, and, on 29 February 1924, he delivered a remarkable lecture The Story of the Brain, in which he recorded a generous appreciation of the role of the phrenologists in the early foundations of psychiatric thought and practice.

A key figure in the early spread of moral treatment in the United States was Benjamin Rush (1745–1813),[9] an eminent physician at Pennsylvania Hospital. He limited his practice to mental illness and developed innovative, humane approaches to treatment. He required that the hospital hire intelligent and sensitive attendants to work closely with patients, reading and talking to them and taking them on regular walks. He also suggested that it would be therapeutic for doctors to give small gifts to their patients every so often. However, Rush's treatment methods included bloodletting (bleeding), purging, hot and cold baths, mercury, and strapping patients to spinning boards and "tranquilizer" chairs.[10]

A Boston schoolteacher, Dorothea Dix (1802–1887), also helped make humane care a public and a political concern in the US. On a restorative trip to England for a year, she met Samuel Tuke. In 1841 she visited a local prison to teach Sunday school and was shocked at the conditions for the inmates and the treatment of those with mental illnesses. She began to investigate and crusaded on the issue in Massachusetts and all over the country. She supported the moral treatment model of care.[11] She spoke to many state legislatures about the horrible sights she had witnessed at the prisons and called for reform. Dix fought for new laws and greater government funding to improve the treatment of people with mental disorders from 1841 until 1881, and personally helped establish 32 state hospitals that were to offer moral treatment. Many asylums were built according to the so-called Kirkbride Plan.