Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 January 2018
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.)
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