Friends Asylum, Morgan Hinchman, and Moral Insanity

FRIENDS ASYLUM, MORGAN HINCHMAN, AND MORAL INSANITY By Charles L. Cherry* It is ironic that Friends Asylum, often called the most progressive and enlightened mental hospital in early nineteenth-century America , should become involved in the celebrated forced commitment case of Morgan Hinchman, a case which not only generated intense pubUc interest,1 but which also revealed the medical, legal, and social compUcations implicit in the term "moral insanity." Modeled on WilUam Tuke's York Retreat (1796), Friends Asylum for the Insane opened in 1817 on fifty-eight acres of farmland in the Frankford section of Philadelphia. It was the first institution in America for moral treatment of the insane, essentially a therapy of kindness espoused by such ancient physicians as Asclepiades and Soranus, but a therapy that, overcome by the medieval witchhunting inspired by Sprenger and Kraemer's Malleus Maleficarum (The Witches' Hammer, 1484), had been sporadic until invigorated and given fresh direction under the benevolent suasion of men like PhiUppe Pinel and Tuke. Until the Hinchman incident, Friends Asylum (now called Friends Hospital) enjoyed a period of moderate expansion and a growing reputation as former staff members Uke Thomas Kirkbride and Pliny Earle became important leaders in American psychiatry. Morgan Hinchman, a member of the North Meeting of Friends in Philadelphia, was committed by family and friends to Friends *Charles L. Cherry, associate professor of English at Villanova University, is currently Assistant to the President, University of Pennsylvania, as an American Council on Education Fellow. 1. See Public Ledger (PL), 9 March 1849 to 23 April, 1849; The Pennsylvania Freeman, 19 April, 1849, p. 3, Col. 4; Pennsylvania Inquirer and National Gazette, 16 April, 1849, p. 2, col. 2. Albert Deutsch, The Mentally III in America: A History of Their Care and Treatment from Colonial Times, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), p. 423, asserts that die Hinchman case "served to emphasize the necessity for legislation clarifying and extending the common law to conform more closely to the requirements of an increasingly complex social order." 20 MORGAN HINCHMAN AND MORAL INSANITY 21 Asylum on January 7, 1847 and left on July 6 of the same year.2 According to asylum records he was a thirty-year-old farmer suffering from "mania," which had first evidenced itself in 1841. Some time after his discharge, Hinchman charged that he had been forcibly committed as part of a conspiracy to deprive him of his property. Those assuming a major role in the commitment and who were formally charged in Hinchman's suit were: Samuel S. Richie and Edward Richie, brothers who played the major role in conveying Hinchman to the asylum; John M. Whitall, George M. Elkinton and John Lippincott, who assisted the Richies; John D. Griscom, Hinchman's family physician who encouraged him to go; Anna Webb Hinchman, Morgan's sister; John L. Kite, a physician who issued the certificate of insanity; Elizabeth Robeson Shoemaker Taylor, the sister of Hinchman's wife, Margaretta Shoemaker Hinchman; Benjamin H. Warder, a manager of Friends Asylum who gave the order of admission; Philip Garrett, superintendent of Friends Asylum; Joshua H. Worthington, the resident physician of Friends Asylum; Charles Evans, attending physician of Friends Asylum; WiUiam Biddle, a member of the sheriff's jury that tried the question of Morgan's insanity after his being committed ; Thomas Wistar, Jr., charged with having been criminaUy involved in the sale of Morgan's property. The defendants would seem to have had a strong case in their attempts to prove both the lack of a conspiracy and the need for commitment.3 Testimony regarding Hinchman's strange conduct 2."Asylum Register of Admissions and Discharges May 20, 1817 to February 24, 1885." Friends Hospital Archives. Consulted through the courtesy of Dr. William P. Camp, Director of Friends Hospital. A number of hospital documents are now in the Quaker Collection of the Haverford College Library; I examined these through the courtesy and assistance of Edwin B. Bronner, Librarian, and Barbara Curtis, Quaker Bibliographer. Both "The Minutes of the Managers of Friends Asylum" (vol. 3) for 1849-1850 and "The Director's Diary" for the same period do not discuss the Hinchman case. The only indirect allusions...