St. Elizabeths Hospital

   , Washington, D.C. Owing to the efforts of American psychiatry reformer Dorothea Dix (1802–1887), in 1852 Congress passed an act founding the Government Hospital for the Insane under the Department of the Interior. Intended to serve as a receptacle for members of the armed services with psychiatric illnesses, as well as for citizens of Washington, D.C.—at the time little numerous—the hospital opened its doors in 1855. (The capital later acquired a separate asylum, and thereafter the Government Hospital took only the spillover from it.) During the Civil War, the St. Elizabeth building of the hospital served as a general hospital for wounded soldiers, and because the troops were reluctant to have their address characterized as a hospital for the insane, the use gradually began of calling the entire institution St. Elizabeth Hospital. In 1916, it was renamed St. Elizabeths Hospital (the "s" officially lacking an apostrophe). Of its superintendents, Charles H. Nichols was the first, who came in 1852 just after Congress had appropriated funds and left in 1877 to take charge of the Bloomingdale Hospital for the Insane then in New York City (after 1894 in White Plains, NY). The best known superintendent was doubtless the psychoanalyst William Alanson White (1870–1937), who arrived in 1903 and on whose watch the hospital expanded greatly its scientific work. In 1907, White added a psychological laboratory, and in 1914 he appointed a full-time psychoanalyst. In 1924, under White’s direction, hospital psychiatrist Nolan D. C. Lewis (1889–1979)* and co-investigators introduced to the United States Julius Wagner von Jauregg’s malarial-fever cure for neurosyphilis. When White died in office in 1937, the hospital had over 5000 beds.

   In 1957, English psychiatrist Joel Elkes moved to the United States at the invitation of Seymour Kety (1915–2000) and Robert A. Cohen (1909–?) of the National Institute of Mental Health to set up a clinical neuropharmacological research center (CNRC) at the hospital. Remaining until 1963, Elkes furthered some pathbreaking work in the neurosciences at the hospital, and such clinical investigators as German emigré psychiatrist Fritz Freyhan (1912–1982), previously at a mental hospital in Delaware, and British psychiatrist Anthony Hordern (1925–), who had just finished training in London, undertook clinial trials.

   In a series of reorganizations, the hospital came under the Federal Security Agency in 1940, then under the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in 1953, then ultimately under the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in 1967; finally, after further churning, it devolved in 1987 to the District of Columbia.

   Erving Goffman’s Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (1961), one of the cornerstone documents of the antipsychiatry movement, was based on St. Elizabeths. (See Antipsychiatry Movement: Goffman.)