Founding Friends: Families, Staff, and Patients at the Friends Asylum in Early Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (review)

Book Reviews Founding Friends: Families, Staff, and Patients at the Friends Asylum in EarlyNineteenth-CenturyPhiladelphia. ByPatriciaD'Antonio. Bethlehem, Pa.: Lehigh University Press, 2006. 253 pp. Map, illustration, tables, appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index. $46.50. The author ofthis history ofthe Friends Asylum in Frankford, Pennsylvania , a psychiatric nurse turned historian, is particularly interested in the history ofthe care ofpatients at the Friends Asylum and they way in which all the actors—families, superintendents, managers, and other staff— participated in that care. The strongest parts of this work are the chapters which draw the most heavily on the Superintendents' Diaries and reflect something of what life was like at the asylum when it was under lay management and moral treatment was the primary therapeutic approach. The author adequately conveys a sense ofthe difficulties faced in trying to care forthe insane without the use ofrestraints or other harshtreatments. The emphasis on the role of the patients' families in negotiating the care they received and the way in which the Asylum itself acted as a family is a different emphasis from otherinstitutional histories and apositive feature of this work. While there is material of interest in this volume, it ultimately does not fulfill its promise to bring a "new perspective on institutional life. . . ." (p. 24) because it does notprovide the promised context in which to understand how Friends Asylum was similar to and different from other asylums ofthe same time period. The first chapter which is supposed to locate the establishment ofthe asylum in the religious and social context ofPhiladelphia Quakers of the early nineteenth century is one of the poorest in this volume. The author's attempt to contrast orthodox Friends and Hicksite Friends succeeds only in making the distinction confusing. Terms such as "quietist" and "middling Friends" are either not clearly defined or are used in more than one sense. This history is told with minimal reference to other similar institutions, most notably to the history of The Retreat at York, so wonderfully told by Anne Digby (1985). For example, D'Antonio describes the decrease in the centrality ofwork and increase in more recreational activities, but couches it in terms oftreating the insane more like children than adults. In doing so, she ignores the fact that these amusements were added as the population of patients who were not Quaker and who were wealthier was increasing. As Digby detailed in her history ofThe Retreat, in order to be attractive to those who could help the Asylum financially, these expected Victorian amusements had to be available. The same factors which ultimately caused the failure of moral treatment at Friends Asylum: the financial necessity of Book Reviews53 accepting patients who were not Quakers, the increasing numbers of chronically ill, mentally retarded or epileptics for whom moral treatment alone was not effective, were operating at other institutions as well. The story D'Antonio tells is not a new one, and the parallels at other institutions are not adequately or effectively acknowledged. Katharine MilarEarlham College Emma J. Lapsansky-Werner and Margaret Hope Bacon, Back to Africa: Benjamin Coates and the Colonization Movement in America, 1848—1880 (University Park, Pennsylvania:The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv, 385. Notes, bibliography, index. $50.00, hardcover. Benjamin Coates (1808-1887) was an Orthodox Quaker and Philadelphia wool merchant who became involved with a panoply ofhumanitarian causes, most notably African colonization. He was also vitally interested in education, serving for a two-year term on the Haverford College Board of Managers and for more than four decades in various roles with the Institute for ColoredYouth, the Quaker-sponsored institution ofhigher education for African-Americans inPhiladelphiathatwas aforerunneroftoday's Cheyney State University. After the Civil War, he was a mainstay of the Friends' Freedmen's Association. This volume combines 150 letters by and to Coates (mostly written from 1848 to 1873, with only a few documents after that date) from a galaxy of Quakers and anti-slavery luminaries, with a thorough and judicious introduction from Lapsansky-Werner and Bacon that serves effectively to highlight the human side of Coates and to warmly invite the reader into a consideration ofCoates' correspondence. The readerfinds out, for example, that one reason that Coates never...