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THE ST. LAWRENCE HOSPITAL FOR THE INSANE.


The St. Lawrence State Hospital at Ogdensburg, N.Y., is a center of
public, professional, philanthropic, and legislative interest. Though
projected in advance of the adoption of the system of State care for the
insane, it was opened at a time to make it come under close observation
in relation to the question of State care, and the friends of this
departure from the inefficient, often almost barbarous provisions of
county house confinement could have no better example to point the
excellence of their theories than this new and progressively planned
State hospital. The members of the State Lunacy Commission and Miss
Schuyler and her colleagues of the State Charities Aid Society, who
fought the State care bills through the Legislature this winter and in
1890, would be repaid for all of their trouble by contrasting the
condition of the inmates of the St. Lawrence State Hospital with the
state they were in under their former custodians, the county officers of
the northern New York counties. At the best, even when these officials
realized the responsibility of their charge and were actuated by humane
impulses, the county houses offered no chance of remedial treatment.
Custody and maintenance, the former mainly a reliance on force, the
later often of scant provision, were the sum total of what was deemed
necessary for the lunatics. In their new environment they find
everything as different in accommodations and treatment as the word