The Pennsylvania Hospital: Its Founding and Functions

The Pennsylvania Hospital was the first general hospital in Colonial America. As the following excerpt shows, this hospital was actually founded, in part, to protect the populace, under the guise of providing medical care, from certain classes of persons who annoyed or threatened them. Some of the persons destined for such “hospitalization,” but, as the second excerpt shows by no means all of them, were considered and labeled as “distempered in mind” or “lunaticks.” It is also of interest that, contrary to current view, “hospitalizing” people for mental illness in general hospitals is not something new, but, on the contrary, was the practice not only in the Pennsylvania Hospital, but also in the New York Hospital, the second hospital to be opened in the Colonies.