The Asylums of Europe * Read before the meeting of the National Association for the Protection of the Insane, at Fifth Avenue Hotel, New York, November 11, 1880.

While visiting Europe during the past summer I had occasion to study the asylums and the asylum systems of Great Britain, France, and Germany. My method of investigation was to visit certain representative institutions, especially those that are supposed to be most advanced in their ideas of the treatment of the insane, but not to confine myself to those exclusively; and also to converse with physicians and superintendents and others who had made themselves acquainted with the methods of managing asylums in their respective countries. In studying these institutions I did not usually avail myself of any letters of introduction, nor did I give any preliminary announcement of my coming, nor was the special object of my visit always stated until the visit was completed. Offers of introduction from men of the highest influence in this department met me, but I had little occasion to accept them. I wished to see the asylums as they were in their actual and average daily life ; in undress rather than in dress parade. In some cases I saw the chiefs of the institutions, in others assistants or subordinates, in others still only the chief attendants. In England and Scotland all classes of the insane are under governmental supervision, and they are visited regularly by the officials, without any warning, whether confined in public or in private asylums. I inspected, therefore, the places that represented all these different modes of caring for the insane,? public institutions, those partly public and partly private, and those entirely private. I also spent two days at the home of J. Wickham Barnes, Esq., who resides near London, and who for many years has had in his house an insane patient who is regularly called upon by the Commissioners in Lunacy. Places like Grheel and Hanwell, and the West Riding asylums, have been so often described that it did not seem necessary to go to them.