The object of the Craig Colony is to remove the burden of the epileptic in the family from the home without subjecting the patient to the hardship of confinement with the insane.  “Very few epileptics suffer permanent insanity in any form except dementia,” says the medical superintendent of the Colony.  “Acute mania and maniac depressive insanity not infrequently appear as a ‘post-convulsive’ condition, that generally subsides within a few hours, or at most a few days.  Rarely the state may persist a month.  Melancholia is extremely infrequent.  Delusions of persecution, hallucinations of sight or hearing, systematized in character, are almost never encountered in epilepsy.”

Only from six to fifteen per cent of epileptics are curable, and hence the work of the Craig Colony is largely palliative of the sufferings of the patients.  Each individual case is studied with the utmost care, however, and patients are given their choice of available occupations.  The Colony is not a custodial institution.  There are no bars on the windows, no walls or high fences about the farm.  The patients are housed in cottages, men and women in separate buildings some distance apart, about thirty to each cottage.  In charge of each of these families are a man and his wife, who utilize the services of some of the patients in the performance of household work, while the others have their duties outside.  Kindness to the unfortunates under their care is impressed upon every employee of the Colony, and an iron-bound rule forbids them to strike a patient even in case of assault.

Besides the agricultural work in the Craig Colony, and that in the soap and broom factories and the brick-yard, the patients are taught blacksmithing, carpentry, dressmaking, tailoring, painting, plumbing, shoemaking, laundrying, and sloyd work.  It is insisted on that all patients physically capable shall find employment as a therapeutic measure.  The records show that on Sundays and holidays and on rainy days, when there is a minimum of physical activity among the patients, their seizures double and sometimes treble in number.  Few of the patients know how to perform any kind of labor when they enter the Colony, but many of them learn rapidly.  It has been repeatedly demonstrated that boys from eighteen to twenty years of age can spend two years in the sloyd shop and leave it fully qualified as cabinet-makers, and capable of earning a journeyman’s wages.

There are about two hundred children in the colony of epileptics at Sonyea, more than half of whom are girls.  As children subject to epileptic seizures are not received in the public schools of the State, the only opportunity for any education among these afflicted little ones whose parents are unable to teach them themselves or provide private tutors for them is in the schools of the Colony.  Some of the children are comparatively bright scholars, while the attempt to teach others seems a hopeless task.  For instance, it took one girl ninety days to learn to lay three sticks in the form of a letter A.