ADDRESS BY
MR. EDWARD W. SHELDON

MR. SHELDON


It is with profound gratification that the Governors welcome your
generous presence to-day on an occasion which means so much to us and
which has perhaps some general significance. For we are met in honor of
what is almost a unique event in our national history, the centennial
anniversary celebration of an exclusively psychopathic hospital. A
summary of its origin and development may be appropriate.

A hundred and fifty years ago the only institutions on this side of the
Atlantic which cared for mental diseases were the Pennsylvania Hospital,
chartered in 1751, a private general hospital which had accommodations
for a few mental cases, and the Eastern State Hospital for the insane,
at Williamsburg, Virginia, a public institution incorporated in 1768. No
other one of the thirteen Colonies had a hospital of any kind, general
or special. With a view of remedying this deplorable lack in New York,
steps were taken in 1769 to establish an adequate general hospital in
the City of New York. This resulted in the grant, on June 11, 1771, of
the Royal Charter of The Society of the New York Hospital. Soon
afterward the construction of the Hospital buildings began on a spacious
tract on lower Broadway opposite Pearl Street, in which provision was
also to be made for mental cases; but before any patients could be
admitted, an accidental fire, in February, 1775, consumed the interior
of the buildings. Reconstruction was immediately undertaken and
completed early in the spring of 1776. But by that time the