Insane in private dwellings -- 100 years ago.

The article traces history of treatment of the insane in private dwellings. The method started years ago at Gheel, Belgium, when the control and administration of the colony at Gheel passed from the Commune into the hands of the state. A few years later, after the Scottish Lunacy Act of 1857, numbers of the mentally ill were treated in private dwellings in Scotland. The system was soon adopted in other countries, but its most remarkable development is to be found in Germany, for, whereas in that country there were in 1882 but two small family-colonies for the insane with scarcely more than fifty patients, ten years later there were thirty-two colonies with 1200 patients, and at the end of 1906 there were fifty-one separate colonies with 2400 patients so treated.