Nursing Needs in the State Mental Hospitals

Abstract

lease from their chains of over fifty patients at the Bicetre Hospital in Paris in 1792 and the presentation in 1842 to the Massachusetts legislature by Dorothea Dix of the indicting memorial in behalf of the insane confined in the jails and almshouses of that state. Passing from this challenge, provoked by righteous wrath, to a third but no less constructive achievement was the organization at McLean Hospital in 1882, by Mary Palmer, of the first training school for nurses in a mental hospitaljust twenty-two years after Florence Nightingale, at St. Thomas's, London, had founded the first training school in a general hospital. Parenthetically it may be added that it is perhaps not without significance that two of these three pioneers in the movements for the humane care of the insane and for the hospitalization of the asylums