We ask it all in the name and through the mediation of Thy Son Jesus Christ, our Lord.  Amen.

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 Revolutionary War was in full course, and the buildings were taken over by the Continental authorities as barracks for troops, and were surrounded by fortifications.  When the British captured the city in September, 1776, they made the same use of the buildings for their own troops, who remained there until 1783.  A long period of readjustment then ensued, and it was not until January, 1791, that the Hospital was at last opened to patients.  In September, 1792, the Governors directed the admission of the first mental case, and for the hundred and twenty-nine years since that time the Society has continuously devoted a part of its effort to the care of the mentally diseased.  After a few years a separate building for them was deemed desirable, and was constructed.  The State assisted this expansion of the Hospital by appropriating to the Society $12,500 a year for fifty years.  This new building housed comfortably seventy-five patients, but ten years later even this proved inadequate in size and undesirable in surroundings.  In the meanwhile a wave of reform in the care of the insane was rising in Europe under the influence of such benefactors as Philippe Pinel in France, and William and Samuel Tuke in England.  Thomas Eddy, a philanthropic