Pennsylvania Hospital History

In these early American years, the Quaker people were known for being more socially adept and caring than the rest of America. They were the first people to integrate mental health into the welfare of their society. However, they did not treat sufferers of mental illnesses tenderly. They housed patients in the basement of the Pennsylvania Hospital which had a meager patient capacity. The few patients that were treated there were often shackled to walls. Pennsylvania Hospital eventually expanded to become its own facility, the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane. Although the Quakers administered cruel treatment, their work was a crucial step in the founding of more mental health facilities in America (Ozarin). However, they hired a Quaker
Often called “The Father of Modern Psychiatry,” he composed the first textbook regarding diseases of the mind. He personally believed that the causes of mental disabilities were complications with the blood vessels in the brain (Ozarin). Unlike most people of his time, he pursued medical treatment for patients because he did not accredit their mental diseases to moral offenses. “Mental illness [must] be freed from moral stigma, and be treated with medicine rather than moralizing” (“Pennsylvania Hospital History…”). Rush’s career and medical intentions were to humanize the way that patients in the psychiatric ward were treated (“Benjamin Rush…”). These methods included, hot and cold baths, bleeding, purging, and some of his own invention: the tranquilizer chair, which was put in place of the straitjacket while still coercing the patient to complete a specific task that they would not normally do based on their psychological condition, and the gyrator which was, “based on the principle of centrifugal action to increase cerebral circulation…” (“Benjamin Rush…”). Benjamin Rush was the first man in America to put the needs of the patient first and he was the man who actually reformed the manner of which patients in mental hospitals were