INEBRIATE ASYLUMS.

Evening Star, Issue 4081, 25 March 1876, Page 1 (Supplement)

INEBRIATE ASYLUMS.

We are sorry to learn from the New. York papers that the inebriate asylums ,r in the United States, from which so ; . much was expected, and concerning ■ which such glowing accounts reached, us from time to time, are turning out disastrous failures. The one opened at..' Ward’s Island in 1868 is virtually closed, after costing the city of New York 668,000 dollars, df ; which only 63,000 , J< were returned to it by the inmates.. Year by year the reports of the house physician became 1 less and less hopeful:/•'; In 1871 he was “compelled to admit that as yet no decisive result has been, reached f and the last superintendent, with a candor as rare as it Was creditable, declared the asylum to be “ nothing more nor less than a temper- ' ance hotel; bub as for curing the habit of drinking, if the drinker has not strength of mind to. keep him from it, we can‘do nothing.” According t6 a leading article in the ‘New York World,’ the early history of the Bingharapton Asylum is simply a record of disgraceful robbery. It received for some years an enormous amount of money from the excise funds ; an extravagant building costing a million'' ■ dollars was erected; the first superintendent was charged with appropriating much money to his own use; the second superintendent was invited to resign; under the third superintendent and the present one the institution has been in all respects admirably managed as a “temperance hotel;” but the most hopeful estimates in official reports do not claim that more than 33 per cent, of all the patients have' been reformed. There is a similar institution of the kind near Boston, and this is in the hands of a superintendent, who was dismissed from the Binghampton Asylum for improper conduct. Judging from the information now before us, refuges of this kind seem to be occasionally projected’ by physicians with very little practice, who take up with philanthropy as a profitable business, and who are consumed by a fervid zeal to serve themselves. Money is readily subscribed, state or municipal grants are obtained, the originator of the scheme is appointed superintendent oL the institution,|and is provided with ah official salary, excellent quarters, fuel and lighting, and the usual “medical comforts;” and thus undertakings‘of this kind are multiplied indefinitely. Some of our country hospitals exist chiefly for the benefit of the resident surgeon, the matron, and the wardsmen, and are in this sense benevolent asylums as well as hospitals.