SHEAR Presentation (2013) - Spaces of Reform

7/28/2019 SHEAR Presentation (2013) - Spaces of Reform

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Spaces of Reform:

Transatlantic Quakerism, the Insane, and Publicizing Humanitarian Advocacy

Background/Purpose

Writing in 1868, the Scottish theologian John Cunningham opened his history of

Quakerism with some reflections on his perception of the sects defining characteristics.

Cunningham wrote, I knew the Quakers only as a religious sect, which had struggled into

existence amid hootings, imprisonments, and martyrdoms; but not as a benevolent Society which

had blessed the world. Then justifying the need for his book, Cunningham rhetorically asked,

who does not wish to know something of those men and women who have led the van in almost

every philanthropic enterprise during the last hundred years?1

Cunninghams introduction nicely captured Quakerisms evolution over its first two

hundred years of existence. For a century after George Fox founded the sect in the wake of the

English Civil War, Quakers were often persecuted on both sides of the Atlantic for their radical

religious views. The Quaker belief in the Inner Light troubled many adherents of more

hierarchical religions. Similarly, Quakers refusals to take political oaths alienated them from

their fellow countrymen who didpublicly pledge their loyalty to the state and its rulers.

However, early Quakerism expressed a deep concern for helping the unfortunate. In 1658,

George Fox called on Londons merchant class to establish a place where he said, all the poor,

blind, lame cripples should be put into, and nurses set over them, and looked to, cherished, and

seen unto that they do not want; and thus they that could work.2

So how did this reviled religion of the seventeenth century develop into one widely

regarded, from the 19th

century to today, as vanguard philanthropists? While much of the Quaker


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humanitarian ventures in abolitionism, prison reform, insane asylum reform, and care for the

indigent stemmed from religious convictions, I argue here that Quaker humanitarian ventures

were also self-consciously intended to present a positive image of the religion to an Atlantic

community that had initially received it with hostility. Through these positive presentations,

Quaker humanitarians worked to gain legitimacy for their institutions and their sect.

In illustrating this transformation, I will briefly examine the careers, reforms, and

connections between two noted late 18th

and early 19th

century reformers Samuel Tuke and

Thomas Eddy. Tuke was an Englishman whose grandfather, William, founded the Retreat at

York as an experiment in moral treatment for the insane. Eddy was an American who sought

to apply similar principles and management techniques first to the State Prison of New York,

then to the New-York Hospital, and finally to the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum.

My examination of Tuke and Eddy is part of my larger dissertation project that explores

the ways transatlantic Quaker reformers from the late-eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth

centuries engaged in abolitionism, prison reform, education reform, and their assistance in the

wake of the Irish Potato Famine. I hope to understand how Quakers used of notions of what we

now call disability in these philanthropic ventures both to reform institutions and to aid their

quest for legitimacy.

For todays presentation, however, I hope to illuminate how three central threads run throughout

the work of Tuke and Eddy:

First: The ideas of moral treatment that Tuke and Eddy used in their institutions movedtransatlantically from France, to England, and then to North America. With each transfer,


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those who harnessed these ideas adapted them to their particular needs and context. Using a

transatlantic approach offers a number of insights:

it illuminates the presence and dynamism of the Quaker reform network;

it illustrates how Tuke and Eddy reshaped similar institutions in both Europe and the United

States;

it reveals how each man adapted these reforms differently based on his own national

context. This approach purposefully challenges the exceptionalism of any particular nation-

state. In essence, neither Tuke nor Eddys reforms reflect just British innovation nor American

ingenuity. Instead, I contend that these reforms and their publicity were inherently

collaborative products of this transatlantic Quaker network.

Second: Tuke and Eddys use of moral treatment in their reforms melded contemporarymedical and psychological beliefs with distinctive Quaker theology.

Finally: Tuke and Eddy also drew on widely accepted post-Enlightenment ideas anddiscourses about bodily and cognitive difference, dependency, and normalcy. Before the

Enlightenment, religious perspectives often interpreted sensory, intellectual, and physical

disabilities as signs of Gods wonder or outward manifestations of spiritual failings. During

the Enlightenment, philosophers like Locke and Diderot contemplated blind and deaf people

as part of thought experiments to understand the human mind and define what being fully

human truly meant.3 With the goal of improving society through reason, these thinkers

helped forge the notion of normalcy against which deviancy and human deficiency could

then be judged. Characterizing the Enlightenment, noted disability studies scholar Rosemarie

Garland-Thomson labeled this transition as a movement from a narrative of the marvelous to

a narrative of the deviant.4


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Tuke and Eddy helped build legitimacy for Quakers throughout the Atlantic world by

incorporating this discourse of disability and normalcy into their institutional reforms. Disability

history informs my analysis here as I interpret historical descriptions of different bodily and

cognitive states as social constructions rather than as objective medical diagnoses.5 Tuke and

Eddys reform proposals are suffused with this emergent post-Enlightenment medicalized

rhetoric of disability. These notions empowered those who harnessed them. Individuals who

worked to cure the insane had the potential to not only improve society, but also help build

positive reputations and potentially lucrative careers. And in their careers, Tuke and Eddy

certainly used these ideas to advertise, raise revenue for, and bolster the status of their

institutions and their faith.

Pinel as Foundation

Before getting into the specifics of Tuke and Eddys connection, it is important to explain

the work of French psychologist Philippe Pinel (20 April 1745 25 October 1826). Pinel gained

his experience working with insane patients and developed the methods of moral management

in his time as the chief physician at the lHpital de Bictre from 1793-1795 and at theHospice

de la Salptrire from 1795 until his death in 1826. Pinels work was not entirely new. For

instance, he preserved the existing classification schema of mental disease as being one of four

varieties melancholia, mania, dementia, or idiotism. However, his treatment methods revealed

the influence of the Enlightenment in two ways: firstly, they were developed based on close

empirical observations; and secondly, they expressed the optimism that people coulddevelop

medical treatments that would cure insanity, thereby improving the lives of the afflicted. These

approaches, which became known as moral treatment, required a kind, yet disciplined space


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that would help patients develop self-restraint and internalize social mores.6 Rejecting corporal

punishment and other prevailing modes of confinement, Pinel felt that one should treat insane

patients with the vigilance of a kind and affectionate parent. Similarly, with his own staff,

Pinel used strict discipline and punished all instances of ill treatment, and every act of

violence toward the patients. Pinel strove to strike the delicate balance between, as he put it,

being mild, and at the same time inflexibly firm.7

As a result of these new ideas, Atlantic communities began a piecemeal move toward

treatingsome people identified as insane or idiots in isolating institutions. As we will see,

both Eddy and Tuke embraced this Enlightenment-forged medicalized understanding of insanity

and Pinels ideas of how to treat those labeled as insane. These emergent perspectives helped

elevate clinical expertise and gave social capital to the physicians, psychiatrists, and

administrators of institutions that cared for the insane and feeble-minded. By adopting these

notions of the diseased human mind and its surrounding rhetoric, Eddy and Tuke advanced both

their institutions and the public status of their Quaker religion.

Samuel Tuke

Ill begin in England and give a bit of background on the Tuke Family. William Tuke

founded the Retreat at York in 1792 as an asylum exclusively for Quaker patients. William Tuke

believed that being surrounded by ones co-religionists would, he said, alleviate the anxiety of

the [patients] relatives, render the minds of the Patients more easy in their lucid intervals, and

consequently tend to facilitate and promote their recovery.8 Furthermore, the Retreat at York

strove to establish a peaceful space, avoid harsh physical punishments, and allay the patients

fears. This approach differed markedly from the squalid conditions and fear-instilling regimen


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used at public asylums like Bethlem Hospital (which was popularly known as Bedlam). Using

a scientific methodology, William Tuke and the Retreats staff developed these treatment

methods through empirical observation, extensive study of contemporary medical literature, and

by following their religious precepts.9 Interestingly, Tuke and the Retreats staff created this

regimen independently of Pinel, as the latter did not publish his major treatise on moral

treatment until 1801.10

In 1813, when Samuel Tuke, William Tukes grandson, published his comprehensive

overview of the Retreat at York, he rewrote the history of its origins by stressing how it drew on

Pinels methods of moral treatment. In this book, Tuke lauded the man he called the

intelligent Dr. Pinel and invoked him to contend, much may be done towards the cure and

alleviation of insanity, by judicious modes of management, and moral treatment.11 Tuke seemed

aware that Pinels name carried with it a currency that would validate the Retreats methods and

assure outsiders of its modern and progressive techniques. This emphasis on the Retreats

medical foundations lent it credibility and enhanced the Tuke familys status by associating them

with contemporary, and Continental European, medical expertise and practice.

To these ends, Tuke included extensive quantitative data of the Retreats effectiveness in

his report. He also included glowing testimonials from other physicians who visited the asylum.

These endorsements melded the authority of the medical community with the humanitarian

associations of Quakerism. For instance, in 1798, Tuke invited Dr. Delarive of Geneva,

Switzerland, to the Retreat. Delarive had previously evaluated other public and private hospitals

throughout Europe, establishing his professional bona fides. After his visit, Delarive wrote

glowingly of the Retreat, noting, The respectable society of Quakers have at length

endeavoured to remedy these evils [of public asylums] by providing those who should have the


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unhappiness to lose their reason, without possessing a fortune adequate to have recourse to

expensive establishments [] all the comforts of life, compatible with their situation.12

In the Report, Tuke also fused Enlightenment empiricism with Quakerisms particular

religious tenets. For instance, Tuke described instances of moral treatments use at the Retreat in

ways that echoed the Quaker practice of laboring with fellow Friends. This practice originated

with George Fox and William Penn and involved earnest, heartfelt pleading intended to help an

individual realize the errors of his or her thoughts or actions. Tukes anecdote about the case of

the violent Herculean-sized patient illustrates this fusion. After one of this patients

particularly violent outbursts, Tuke described the Superintendents response, writing:

[He] conducted him to his apartment, and told him the circumstance on which his

treatment would depend; that it was his anxious wish to make every inhabitant in the

house, as comfortable as possible; and that he sincerely hoped the patient's conduct

would render it unnecessary for him to have recourse to coercion. The maniac was

sensible of the kindness of his treatment [] after sitting some time quietly beside him,

the violent excitement subsided, and he would listen with attention to the persuasions and

arguments of the friendly visiter [sic]. After such conversations, the patient was generally

better for some days or a week; and in about four months he was discharged perfectly

recovered.13

Tuke used this anecdote to reveal the powerful effects of moral treatment with language that

subtly highlighted the Retreats distinctive fusion of Quaker beliefs and contemporary science.

Glowing reviews of the Retreat enhanced its positive reputation and further disseminated the

idea of insanity as a marginal human condition that could, with contemporary scientific

techniques, be cured and improve society as a whole.


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Thomas Eddy

Moving across the Atlantic to North America, I want to give some brief background on

Thomas Eddy, whose connection with Tuke in the 1810s proves very important. Born in

Philadelphia, Eddy was a Quaker merchant who became a major philanthropist in New York,

beginning his career in social reform by working to rewrite New Yorks penal laws in the 1790s.

Through this activity, Eddy helped create a penitentiary system that employed labor and solitary

confinement in lieu of public punishments and executions. Eddy served as the first director of the

State Prison of New York from 1799 to 1801 and published an account of his reforms at the end

of his term. This publication stressed the caring and humane nature of the institution, but did not

adopt any of the specific terminology associated with Pinel or moral treatment. The use of

these concepts would emerge in Eddys later writings only after he came into contact with

Samuel Tuke.

In his 1801 text, Eddy, (like Tuke), stressed that the fusion of Enlightenment ideals and

Quakerism directly influenced his reforms at the New York State Prison. Eddy credited major

Enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu and Beccaria as crucial to his reforms. These men,

as he put it, brought to light the enormous abuses and dreadful miseries produced by cruel laws

and corrupt administration. Eddy also credited William Penns 1680s reform of the criminal

code and elimination of capital punishment in Pennsylvania as central to his governance of the

prison. This Quaker influence appeared in Eddys decision to only hire staff and prison

administrators who were, in his words, Actuated by principles of benevolence, and a love of

justice and humanity.14 Furthermore, Eddy established practices of lay-led services in the

prison, paralleling the Quaker meeting for worship, yet he still recognized the need to have


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clergy lead services as well, which would appeal to other Christians in the multi-denominational

context of the prison.

Tuke-Eddy Connection

Tuke and Eddy, entered into correspondence with each other in 1811 and began a

transatlantic exchange that extended throughout the decade. In this dialogue, the two exchanged

hospital management techniques, fund raising strategies, and methods of institutional self-

presentation.

Tukes notions of moral treatment and the power of laboring with insane patients greatly

influenced Eddy, who adopted much of this terminology in his later writings. Eddy used these

ideas and the success of the Retreat and shifted his focus away from the prison and toward

another institution with which he had been involved since the early 1790s the New-York

Hospital. Eddy claimed that Tukes English techniques would work equally well in the United

States, although, in keeping with his previous report, he presented them as more broadly

Protestant in nature and less specifically Quaker to preserve the appeal to a heterogeneous

religious audience.

For example, in an 1815 report to the Governors of the New-York Hospital, Eddy adopted

the language of Pinel and Tuke and explained that one could not treat, as he put it, mania [as] a

physicalorbodily disease, and adopting for its removal merely physical remedies. Instead,

Eddy implored hospital administrators to embrace the methods of moral management,

claiming, Even with the more violent and vociferous maniacs, it will be found best to approach

them with mild and soft persuasion.15 Yet, in this recommendation, Eddy acknowledged that he

frequently mixed [his] own observation with [Tukes] because Tukes manner of expression


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Eddy worked to improve the conditions in and public reputations of the State Prison, the New-

York Hospital, and later, the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum.

Further transatlantic links emerge contemporaneously and in the rest of the nineteenth

century, such as that between William Tuke and Thomas Scattergood, a Philadelphia Quaker

who visited the Retreat at York in the 1799 and used it as inspiration to propose establishing an

Asylum outside Philadelphia. Administrators at this institution, which became known as Friends

Hospital, corresponded with the Superintendent of the Retreat at York in the 1810s as they

worked to employ moral treatment in a way that would both cure insanity and lead to financial

stability.17 The omnipresence of these transatlantic religious and reform connections suggest

their durability. Yet, they also suggest how important Enlightenment notions were in connecting

these Quaker reformers. Tuke and Eddy are just two in this wider network who embraced these

emerging ideas about disability, insanity, and how to cure cognitive disorders, which they used

to gain legitimacy for their institutions, their reform initiatives, and themselves. Thank you.

1

John Cunningham, The Quakers from Their Origin Till the Present Time: An International History (Edinburgh:John Menzies & Company, 1868), v-vi.2 George Fox, "A Warning to all the Merchants in London, and such as buy and sell," in Gospel truth demonstrated

in a collection of doctrinal books given forth by that faithful minister of Jesus Christ, George Fox: containing

principles essential to Christianity and salvation held among the people called Quakers., vol. 4 (Philadelphia:

Marcus T.C. Gould, 1831), 162.3 Zina Weygand, The Blind in French Society from the Middle Ages to the Century of Louis Braille (Stanford, Calif.:

2 George Fox, "A Warning to all the Merchants in London, and such as buy and sell," in Gospel truth demonstrated

in a collection of doctrinal books given forth by that faithful minister of Jesus Christ, George Fox: containing

principles essential to Christianity and salvation held among the people called Quakers., vol. 4 (Philadelphia:

Marcus T.C. Gould, 1831), 162.3

Zina Weygand, The Blind in French Society from the Middle Ages to the Century of Louis Braille (Stanford, Calif.:

Stanford University Press, 2009); Ernest Freeberg, The Education of Laura Bridgman: The First Deaf and Blind

Person to Learn Language (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).4

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson,Freakery : Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New YorkUniversity Press, 1996), 3.5 Catherine J. Kudlick, Disability History: Why We Need Another Other, The American Historical Review 108,

no. 3 (June 1, 2003): 763793; Simi Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity (New York: New York

University Press, 1998); Lennard J. Davis,Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (New York:

Verso, 1995); Paul Longmore and Lauri Umanski, Introduction: Disability History: From the Margins to the

Mainstream, in Paul K Longmore and Lauri Umansky, eds., The New Disability History: American Perspectives

(New York: New York University Press, 2001), 129.6 Gerald N. Grob, The Mad Among Us: A History of the Care of Americas Mentally Ill(New York: Free Press,

1994), 2529.7

Philippe Pinel,A Treatise on Insanity, trans. D.D. Davis (Sheffield: W. Todd for Cadell and Davies, 1806), 5354.


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8State of an institution near York, called The Retreat of persons afflicted with disorders of the mind. (York: [s.n.],

1796), 4.9

Louis Charland, Benevolent Theory: Moral Treatment at the York Retreat, History of Psychiatry 18, no. 1

(March 1, 2007): 6466.10

Ibid., 64.11

Samuel Tuke,Description of the Retreat: An Institution Near York for Insane Persons of the Society of Friends (York: W. Alexander, 1813), 132.12 Ibid., 231233.13 Ibid., 147.14 Thomas Eddy,An Account of the State Prison or Penitentiary House, in the City of New-York(Printed by Isaac

Collins and son, 1801), 67; 22.15 Thomas Eddy, Hints for Introducing an Improved Mode of Treating the Insane in the Asylum (Governors of the

New-York Hospital, 1815), 7, 8.16

Ibid., 4, 5.17 Caleb Cresson, Caleb Cresson Letter to George Jepson, et. al., May 24, 1817, Collection No. 1184, Families of

Philadelphia Papers, Box 16, Caleb Cresson (1775-1821) Correspondence & Manuscripts, Haverford Special

Collections Quaker Collection; George Jepson, George Jepson Letter to Caleb Cresson, July 25, 1817, Collection

No. 1184, Families of Philadelphia Papers, Box 16, Caleb Cresson (1775-1821) Correspondence & Manuscripts,

Haverford Special Collections Quaker Collection.

SHEAR Presentation (2013) - Spaces of Reform

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