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Samuel Tuke's First Publication on the Treatment of Patients at the Retreat, 1811

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

Richard Hunter
Affiliation:
The National Hospital, Queen Square, W.C.1; and Friern, Halliwick and Whittington Hospitals, London, N.
Ida Macalpine
Affiliation:
The National Hospital, Queen Square, W.C.1; and Friern, Halliwick and Whittington Hospitals, London, N.

Extract

In 1963 there fell to be celebrated the 150th anniversary of a modest book giving an account of the new mild or “moral” treatment of the insane at the Asylum opened by the Quakers in 1796, Samuel Tuke's Description of The Retreat, an institution near York for insane persons of the Society of Friends. Containing an account of its origin and progress, the modes of treatment, and a statement of cases, York, 1813. Tuke achieved in England and America what Philippe Pinel did in France, and their names remain coupled in history as they were by contemporaries. “To those two great and good men, society is indebted for nearly all the improvements which followed their essays” said John Conolly, the third of the triumvirate who inaugurated the modern mental hospital era (1). In the course of preparing a reprint of Tuke's book recently we were privileged to have access to the privately printed Memoirs of Samuel Tuke, London, 1860, 26 copies “for the use of the family only”, edited in two volumes of together more than 1,000 pages. (A selection from these volumes emphasizing the religious aspects of Tuke's philanthropic works formed the basis of Charles Tylor's biography of Samuel Tuke (2), published for general circulation.)

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1965 

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References

1. Address by Dr. John Conolly on receiving a presentation from the Earl of Shaftesbury on his retirement from the post of Visiting Physician to the Middlesex County Pauper Lunatic Asylum at Hanwell (now St. Bernard's Hospital), 1852. In Sir James Clark's A Memoir of John Conolly, M.D., D.C.L., London, 1869. p. 48.Google Scholar
2. Tylor, Charles (1900). Samuel Tuke; his Life, Work and Thoughts. London.Google Scholar
3. Hunter, R., and Macalpine, Ida (1964). Introduction to S. Tuke's Description of the Retreat. York, 1813. Reprinted London: Dawsons, 1964. (Psychiatric Monograph Series: 7.) Google Scholar
4. Battie, W. (1962). A Treatise on Madness. London, 1758. Reprinted London: Dawsons, 1962. (Psychiatric Monograph Series: 3.) Google Scholar
5. Hunter, R., and Macalpine, Ida (1963). Three Hundred Tears of Psychiatry 1535–1860. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
6. A Sketch of the Origin, Progress and Present State of The Retreat. York, 1828.Google Scholar
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