Difference between revisions of "Portal:Featured Article Of The Week"

From Asylum Projects
Jump to: navigation, search
Line 1: Line 1:
 
{{FAformat
 
{{FAformat
|Title= Thomas Story Kirkbride
+
|Title= Ellis Island Isolation Hospital
|Image= Thomas Story Kirkbride.jpg
+
|Image= aerialEllisNOW.jpg
 
|Width= 150px
 
|Width= 150px
|Body= In 1840 Kirkbride was asked to become superintendent of the newly established Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane. He accepted for largely practical reasons, as his training and experience interning at Friends' Asylum and at Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Hospital provided him with the necessary background for the position. As Superintendent he became one of the most prominent authorities on mental health care in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
+
|Body= In the nineteenth century, the United States had suffered three devastating cholera outbreaks, with each originating abroad. As Ellis Island being the port of entry, it's two story wooden dispensary was not equipped to handle such threats. For the next decade the issue of how to protect the health of the nation and the immigrants loomed over Ellis. The problem would only intensify when the wooden infirmary caught fire and burned to the ground in 1897.
  
In 1844, Kirkbride helped to found AMSAII, serving as secretary, then later as president from 1862 to 1870. Kirkbride pioneered what would be known as the Kirkbride Plan, to improve medical care for the insane, as a standardization for buildings that housed the patients.
+
President Theodore Roosevelt proposed a change in immigration policy and recognized that Ellis Island needed a more thorough way to process it's health screening. There was no extra vacant land to build a hospital, but tons of rocks being excavated to build the New York subway system provided enough to landfill two islands. Designated simply as Island No. 2 and Island No. 3, they were home to the general and infectious diseases hospitals.
  
Kirkbride's influential work, On the Construction, Organization, and General Arrangements of Hospitals for the Insane with Some Remarks on Insanity and Its Treatment, was published in 1854, and again in 1880. Kirkbride had been influenced by the Quaker-founded York Retreat in England whose leader, Samuel Tuke, had published an account entitled, Practical Hints on the Construction and Economy of Pauper Lunatic Asylums (York, England, 1815). The Tuke family had instituted in their hospital a "moral treatment" approach to care for patients, which centered upon humane and kindly behavior. The Superintendents’ Association made efforts to institute this approach in their hospitals. [[Thomas Story Kirkbride|Click here for more...]]
+
Connected by a gangplank, Island No. 2 was separated by 200 feet of water from the original island and home to the new General Hospital. It opened in 1902, with 120 beds making it larger then most of the city hospitals at the time, and would eventually expand to 275 beds. The hospital included four operating rooms, a delivery room, and a morgue. A psychopathic pavilion was built after two mentally ill patients committed suicide in the general hospital. The pavilion was incorporated to house "idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded persons, insane persons, and epileptics." [[Ellis Island Isolation Hospital|Click here for more...]]
 
}}
 
}}

Revision as of 04:09, 6 August 2012

Featured Article Of The Week

Ellis Island Isolation Hospital


aerialEllisNOW.jpg

In the nineteenth century, the United States had suffered three devastating cholera outbreaks, with each originating abroad. As Ellis Island being the port of entry, it's two story wooden dispensary was not equipped to handle such threats. For the next decade the issue of how to protect the health of the nation and the immigrants loomed over Ellis. The problem would only intensify when the wooden infirmary caught fire and burned to the ground in 1897.

President Theodore Roosevelt proposed a change in immigration policy and recognized that Ellis Island needed a more thorough way to process it's health screening. There was no extra vacant land to build a hospital, but tons of rocks being excavated to build the New York subway system provided enough to landfill two islands. Designated simply as Island No. 2 and Island No. 3, they were home to the general and infectious diseases hospitals.

Connected by a gangplank, Island No. 2 was separated by 200 feet of water from the original island and home to the new General Hospital. It opened in 1902, with 120 beds making it larger then most of the city hospitals at the time, and would eventually expand to 275 beds. The hospital included four operating rooms, a delivery room, and a morgue. A psychopathic pavilion was built after two mentally ill patients committed suicide in the general hospital. The pavilion was incorporated to house "idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded persons, insane persons, and epileptics." Click here for more...