Pennsylvania Hospital is a private, non-profit, 515-bed teaching hospital located in Center City Philadelphia and is part of the University of Pennsylvania Health System. Founded on May 11, 1751, by Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Thomas Bond, Pennsylvania Hospital is one of the earliest established public hospitals in the United States. It is also home to America's first surgical amphitheatre and its first medical library. The hospital's main building, dating to 1756, is a National Historic Landmark.
James Cowles Prichard was a British physician and ethnologist with broad interests in physical anthropology and psychiatry. His influential Researches into the Physical History of Mankind touched upon the subject of evolution. From 1845, Prichard served as a Medical Commissioner in Lunacy. He also introduced the term "senile dementia".
The Kirkbride Plan was a system of mental asylum design advocated by American psychiatrist Thomas Story Kirkbride (1809–1883) in the mid-19th century. The asylums built in the Kirkbride design, often referred to as Kirkbride Buildings, were constructed during the mid-to-late-19th century in the United States.
Pliny Earle II, MD was an American physician, psychiatrist, and poet. He was the son of the inventor Pliny Earle of the Earle family.
Samuel Sloan was a Philadelphia-based architect and best-selling author of architecture books in the mid-19th century. He specialized in Italianate villas and country houses, churches, and institutional buildings. His most famous building—the octagonal mansion "Longwood" in Natchez, Mississippi—is unfinished; construction was abandoned during the American Civil War.
The Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital, also known as Kirkbride's Hospital or the Pennsylvania Hospital for Mental and Nervous Diseases, was a psychiatric hospital located at 48th and Haverford Streets in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. It operated from its founding in 1841 until 1997. The remaining building, now called the Kirkbride Center is now part of the Blackwell Human Services Campus.
The Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane, also known as The Superintendents' Association, was organized in Philadelphia in October, 1844 at a meeting of 13 superintendents, making it the first professional medical specialty organization in the U.S.
Asylum architecture in the United States, including the architecture of psychiatric hospitals, affected the changing methods of treating the mentally ill in the nineteenth century: the architecture was considered part of the cure. Doctors believed that ninety percent of insanity cases were curable, but only if treated outside the home, in large-scale buildings. Nineteenth-century psychiatrists considered the architecture of asylums, especially their planning, to be one of the most powerful tools for the treatment of the insane, targeting social as well as biological factors to facilitate the treatment of mental illnesses. The construction and usage of these quasi-public buildings served to legitimize developing ideas in psychiatry. About 300 psychiatric hospitals, known at the time as insane asylums or colloquially as “loony bins” or “nuthouses,” were constructed in the United States before 1900. Asylum architecture is notable for the way similar floor plans were built in a wide range of architectural styles.
Norristown State Hospital, originally known as the State Lunatic Hospital at Norristown, is an active state-funded psychiatric hospital located outside the city of Philadelphia in suburban Norristown, Pennsylvania. It was originally designed between 1878 and 1880, by the local firm of Wilson Brothers & Company; of which, the original structure was set in a red brick Victorian High Gothic motif. It remains active for its originally clinical intention, and currently serving Bucks County, Chester County, Delaware County, Montgomery County and Philadelphia County, providing clinical services in General Psychiatry and Forensic Psychiatry. Additionally, there are various agencies that sublet state hospital buildings for a variety of psychiatric, residential and social services. These agencies currently make up the majority of services that are offered on the grounds of the hospital.
Sir John Charles Bucknill was an English psychiatrist and mental health reformer. He was the father of judge Sir Thomas Townsend Bucknill QC MP.
Henry Mills Hurd was the first director of the Johns Hopkins Hospital and remained in that post for 22 years (1889–1911) following which he was appointed Secretary to the Board of Trustees (1911–1927). He was also the first Professor of Psychiatry at the medical school from its opening in 1893 until 1905.
Ann Preston was an American physician, activist, and educator. As head of the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, she was the first female dean of a medical school in the United States of America.
The Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania (WMCP) was a Philadelphia medical college founded for women in 1850. It was the second medical institution in the world established to train women in medicine to earn the M.D. degrees after the New England Female Medical College in Boston, which was established two years earlier in 1848.
John Haslam (1764–1844) was an English apothecary, physician and medical writer, known for his work on mental illness. Haslam's case study of James Tilly Matthews is the earliest detailed description of paranoid schizophrenia.
Rufus Wyman (1778–1842) was an American physician. He was the first physician and superintendent of the Asylum for the Insane, renamed in 1823 to McLean Hospital, part of the Massachusetts General Hospital system, and the first mental hospital in the state.
John Curwen (1821–1901) was Superintendent of the first public mental hospital in Pennsylvania. He personally knew the thirteen founders of the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions of the Insane (AMSAII), now the American Psychiatric Association. He served as secretary-treasurer of the Association for 34 years (1856–1890).
John B. Chapin M.D. (1829-1918) was an American physician and mental hospital administrator. He was an advocate for the removal of mentally ill patients from the almshouses in New York State to a hospital setting and helped to pass a state law that provided hospital care for the patients.
Edward Nathaniel Brush was an American physician, a mental hospital administrator, and an editor of psychiatric journals.
Owen Copp, M.D. (1858–1933) was an American physician and a psychiatric administrator. He was president of the American Psychiatric Association from 1921 to 1922, and proposed a progressive program in mental health in the United States.
George Alder Blumer, M.D. (1857-1940) was a physician, a mental hospital administrator, and a journal editor. He was a leader in the provision of humanitarian care for mental hospital patients.
