How Dr. Charles H. Nichols would have enjoyed this meeting had he lived to attend it! It is as an active participator in debate rather than as a writer of papers that he is remembered, although he wrote easily and well. "But his principal work, as with all successful superintendents of institutions for the insane," as Doctor Godding has written of him, "has been in the daily hospital routine, whose record is silent but for its results."

Richard Gundry.—Another genial soul who wrote gracefully and brought to bear upon the work of his pen the resources of a wonderful memory. Tributes from Doctors Richardson and Hurd to the memory of this departed brother have been read before you such a short while ago that I need not itemize in this presence the sum of our indebtedness to him.

Anything that might be said of Dr. Thomas S. Kirkbride's contributions to our literature would seem inadequate in this city where his honorable and useful life was lived and where his great activity was best known. Few men have done more than he to impress upon their fellows the correct principles of construction and organization. Indeed, in this department of work he was facile princeps. We have outlived the Kirkbride plan to large extent, but the principles he instilled can never die. And would that his views as to what should be the size of hospitals for the insane might gain a wider acceptance to-day!

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Dr. A. O. Kellogg filled a rôle peculiarly his own as an author, and as the profound critic of Shakespeare, from the point of view of the alienist, has secured for himself a safe, permanent, and exalted place in our literature. Some may accuse him of reading in Homer more than ever Homer knew," but his Shakespeare's "Delineations of Insanity, Imbecility, and Suicide" will ever remain a token of his keen powers of psychological analysis.

In a brief address like this, one can not mention a tithe of the men whose literary claims entitle them to a hearing in our court of record to-day. Even Goldsmith must receive scant notice. He belonged to the newer school, was perhaps our first typical representative of it, and, in the few years of his brilliant career as an alienist, did much by his example and his writings to point the way and light the "lamps of life that pass from hand to hand.”

It is a cheering thought that to-day our literature was never more worthily represented. Our fathers may on the whole have written better, but they certainly had no better message to bear than our present generation of contributors. To-day the question is not,

Can he write? but rather, Has he something to say? there being few opportunities in this busier and more scientific era for the display of the gift of utterance without communication, or, to be more technical, the exhibition of symptoms of reckless logorrhoea.

There is one thought that presses as I close. It is that the reorganization of this association has probably done more for the cause of American psychiatric literature than any single factor of our evolution. The mere holding of a medical office in a hospital for the insane is no longer per se a qualification for membership. Shall not the value of that membership be fully enhanced by requiring of candidates a scientific contribution of merit by way of thesis for admission? Would not such a rule tend to the enrichment of our literature and the fostering of a spirit of original research? While in the action of this association we have occasion for profound gratitude, we must beware of the enervating effect of self-satisfaction. There is always promise and potency in frowning discontent and naught but inertia in a bland complacency. Let then the uplook and outreach go steadily on and contentment as to the status of American psychiatric literature come to us, if at all, only when it can safely stand the test of comparison with that of any other civilized country in the world. Lord Bacon it was, we remember, who compared his sanguine outlook of the field of science under his new philosophy of induction with the aromatic inspiring breezes that seemed to be wafted from the newly discovered continent of America.

Fain would one linger over the catalogue of stars that have brightened the firmament of our literature during the past halfcentury and that reveal to us, who grope and seek, the iter ad astra. Many the sermon that has been preached before this body and printed in our journals-great the diversity and conflict of doctrine-many the convert and pervert, but heaven grant that we may all profit by all that is worthy and useful in the lives of our professional forbears and ever stand firm in the faith in our cause.

The late Bishop Bloomfield once, late in life, visited the University Church of Cambridge and there recognized a verger whom he remembered when he was himself an undergraduate. The bishop said he was glad to see him looking so well at such an advanced age, and the old man made answer thus: "Oh, yes, my lord, I have heard every sermon which has been preached in this church for fifty years, and, thank God, I am a Christian still."

NEW ENGLAND ALIENISTS OF THE LAST HALF

CENTURY.

BY T. W FISHER, M. D.,

Superintendent Boston Lunatic Hospital, Boston, Mass.

On this first semi-centennial of our Association the duty has been assigned me of making appropriate reference to our deceased members from New England. It has been thought fit to call the society together in the place of its birth to review its history and to award to each fellow his place in the Ruhmeshalle of our specialty. To state "concisely and appreciatively" the life-work of twentyseven men so accomplished in twenty minutes would entitle the writer himself to a seat in Walhalla!

The faithful worker in the field of modern psychiatry must be at once a scientist, a humanitarian and a man of affairs. Until our recent very satisfactory change of name and organization, membership in this society implied the management of some hospital for the treatment of insanity. Like the United States, we began with thirteen members, of which seven were from New England. With our numbers augmented by the increase of hospitals, and the admission of assistant physicians and other alienists, New England still holds numerically a high position. Of two hundred and eighty-one members in 1893, she had forty-eight. The society, as well as the States, has prospered; yet if the original thirteen sat down with unbroken ranks to dinner in Jones' Hotel, the death of Vice-President White within the year was "confirmation strong as death" of the old superstition.

And what a long death-roll of noted men has followed. Of the twenty-seven from New England, I have known eighteen, most of them intimately. In reviewing this list of pioneers in American pyschiatry, the name of Ray, to my mind, like that of Abou Ben Adhem, leads all the rest. Not that he loved his fellow-men" more than all the others, but because of a certain intellectual preeminence. To have called him, as I did when we last met, the Nestor of his department of medicine, was a feeble compliment. We all too soon become, by reason of age, in some respects distinguished above our confreres. In him were combined fullness of

years and ripeness of intellect.

a high order.

And his intellect was naturally of

Doctor Curwen says of him, "No one who ever enjoyed these opportunities of hearing him pour forth the richness of a mind well stored with the treasures of literature in general; and of insanity in particular, will ever forget the instruction he then received. His sound judgment and matured views always gave him a commanding influence."

He was educated at Bowdoin and Harvard. In 1841 he was appointed superintendent of the Augusta Hospital, and of the Butler Hospital in 1845. He spent a part of this year in Europe, and devoted the next two to the building of the hospital. He remained in charge twenty-two years. He published a work on the jurisprudence of insanity of seven hundred pages, which at once gave him a wide celebrity. It was the first and, for many years, the only important contribution to the scientific study of insanity in this country. It is still a standard authority at home and in Europe, and a monument of wisdom, learning, sound judgment, and large experience. It is destined to hold a high place in the literature of insanity in spite of the great advances of the last ten years. His books on "Mental Hygiene" and "Mental Pathology" are of equal importance.

Doctor Woodward, our first president, must have been a remarkable man in many ways. Doctor Curwen gives an interesting account of the formation of our society as the result of a conference between him and Doctor Stribling of West Virginia. He, with Doctor Todd, was active in raising funds for and establishing the Hartford Retreat in 1823. He was first superintendent of the Worcester Hospital, opened in 1832.

His printed works are confined to reports, but these were widely circulated, the usual edition being three thousand, and making for fourteen years a volume of six hundred pages. I have before me a presentation copy of the first four reports bound. It contains. Doctor Woodward's autograph, and was presented to Edward Everett, then governor. Horace Mann was chairman of the building committee. There is a lithograph of the hospital, with a stagecoach driving up, and the present fine grove of elms dwindled to currant bushes.

The floor plan shows a hospital for two hundred and forty patients, all in single rooms. The corners show the present cages,

or verandas, as they were called. Each ward opened on a square room with two sides of unglazed iron sash, making a fine airingroom for all weathers. Aside from their suggestion of a menagerie when in use, these verandas would be desirable adjuncts to any hospital.

They

Doctor Woodward showed in his reports ideas quite up to the present concerning insanity and its treatmeut. In 1833 he recommended small detached homes for convalescents. "They should form a large family and not one should be idle. would require but little restraint, and might ride or range the grounds at pleasure." He also advocates separate buildings for quiet and chronic cases. Also detached lodges for the noisy and violent. This was essentially the cottage system, though Dotor Spurzheim had already advocated it.

In his third report he considers labor as a remedial agent, and advises the erection of workshops and a chapel. In his fourth, besides fifteen tables of statistics, he gives a detailed account of the results of treatment in ten cases. He describes the great improvement in numerous cases from prisons and almshouses, where they had been subjected to neglect and hardship. In an appendix he discusses the moral insanity of Pritchard and Pinel, with several cases. He also wrote a series of articles on asylums for inebriates.

Doctor Bell was also one of the original seven. He was a son of Governor Bell of New Hampshire, and his social and intellectual qualities were of a high order. He was educated at Bowdoin and Dartmouth, and continued his medical studies in Europe. He was active in founding the Concord Hospital, and was superintendent of the McLean Asylum for twenty years. In 1845 he went to Europe for the purpose of studying hospitals there. The results of his observations were embodied in the plans for the Butler Hospital. He was for two years president of the Massachusetts Medical Society. At the breaking out of the rebellion he was appointed. surgeon of the Eleventh Massachusetts Volunteers. He was soon promoted to be brigade-surgeon of General Hooker's division. He died suddenly in camp of endocarditis in 1862. His writings on subjects relating to general medicine, as well as to insanity, were numerous and important. He is best known for his description of that form of acute mania called Bell's disease.

In 1839 the Boston Lunatic Hospital was opened to relieve the Worcester Hospital of its city cases. Doctor Butler was its first