“ That is the way I feel about Bloomingdale Hospital as we see it to-day pulsating with ever-fresh life and ever-fresh problems! How different from a simple human being, after all! The heart and wisdom of many a man and woman has gone into the perpetuation of what a few thoughtful men started in 1821 and the result is that it is ever renewing its youth. ”

“ When an individual shows himself to be dangerous for others or for himself, and that he has lost his responsibility, we can no longer employ the ordinary means of defense; we are obliged to defend ourselves against him, and defend him against himself by special means which it is useless to apply to other men; we are obliged to modify legal conduct toward him. All disorders of the mind oblige us to modify our social conduct toward the patient, but only in a few cases are we obliged to modify at the same time our legal conduct; and these are the sort of cases that constitute lunacy. ”

“ The great step was taken when all of life was seen again in its broad relations, without any special theory but frankly as common sense finds it, viz., as the activities and behavior of definite individuals—very much as Aristotle had put it—"living organisms in their 'form' or activity and behavior." Psychology had to wake up to studying other minds as well as one's own. Common sense has always been willing to study other persons besides our own selves, and that exactly as we study single organs—viz., for what they are and do and for the conditions of success and failure. ”

“ Each branch has created its rules of the game culminating in the concept of objective science, and the last set of facts to bring itself under the rules of objective science, and to be accepted, has been man as a unit and personality.
The mind and soul of man have indeed had a hard time. To this day, investigators have suffered under the dogma that mind must be treated as purely subjective entity, something that can be studied only by introspection, or at least only with ultra-accurate instruments—always with the idea that common sense is all wrong in its psychology. ”

“ All exhaustions, all moral failings have the closest connection with neuroses and psychoses.
These reflections prove to us that the alienist physician should interest himself more and more in the treatment of neuroses even slight, to rectifying the disorders of temper, to the education of the young, to the direction of the moral hygiene of his country. On many of these points America leads the way; your works of social hygiene, the good battle you are righting against alcoholism, are examples for us. You are the new world, younger, not rendered so inactive by secular habits. ”

“ Psychiatry gives us also a new appreciation of the religious life and needs of our race. Man's religion shows in his capacity to feel and grasp his relations and responsibility toward the largest unit or force he can conceive, and his capacity for faith and hope in a deeper and more lasting interdependence of individual and race with the Ruler or rules of the Universe. Whatever form it may take expresses his capacity to feel himself in humility and faith, and yet with determination, a more or less responsible part of the greatest unit he can grasp. ”

“ If mankind does not take up this self study as Trotter has said, Nature may tire of her experiment man, that complex multicellular gregarious animal who is unable to protect himself even from a simple unicellular organism, and may sweep him from her work-table to make room for one more effort of her tireless and patient curiosity. Psychology should be taught to every doctor and to every lettered man. ”

“ To-day we feel that modern psychiatry has found itself—through the discovery that, after all, the uncritical common-sense view of mind and soul is not so far remote from a critical common-sense view of the individual and its life activity, freed from the forbidding and confusing assumptions through which the concept of mind and soul has been held in bewildering awe. ”

“ The grouping of the patients can be such that the old prejudices need not reach far into the second century of the life of the Hospital. With a man of the vision and practical experience of Dr. Russell, there is no need for an outsider to conjure up a picture of special practical achievements as I have done of the more general principles to-day.
An institution is more than a human life. Many ambitions combine and become part of a group spirit permeating the organization and reaching their fulfilment in the succession of leaders. ”

“ Nature shapes her aims according to her means. Would that every man might realize this simple lesson and maxim—there would be less call for a rank and wanton hankering for relapses into archaic but evidently not wholly outgrown tendencies to the assumption of "omnipotence of thought," revived again from time to time as "New Thought." Psychiatry restores to science and to the practical mind the right to reinclude rationally and constructively what a narrower view of science has, for a time at least, handed over unconditionally to uncritical fancy. ”

“ Through the rise of specialism, it is true, psychiatry itself has arisen and the psychiatrist, like the skilled integrating internist, is interested in the synthesis of the findings in all domains, for only through such synthetic studies, such integration of the functional activities of the whole organism, is it possible to gain a global view of the patient as a person, to make a complete somatic, psychic, and social diagnosis, and to plan a regimen for him that will ensure the best adjustment possible of his internal and external relationships. ”

“ When we consider, as Lord Bacon observes, speaking of common diseases, that "all wise physicians in the prescription, of their regimen to their patients, do ever consider accidentia animi, as of great force to further or hinder remedies or recoveries;" it is difficult to account for the general neglect of moral considerations in the treatment of deranged mind. I hope, however, though in many instances medicine may not be employed with advantage, and its indiscriminate use has been seriously injurious, that we shall not abandon it as altogether useless, in what we term disease of the mind. ”

“ As long as there was no objective experimental science, the culminating solution of life problems had to be intrusted to that remarkable development of religious philosophy which arose from the blending of Hebrew religion and tradition and the loftiest products of the Greek mind, in the form which St. Paul and the early Church fathers gave to the teachings of Christ. From being the form and activation, or function, of the organism in life, the soul feature of man was given an appearance in which it could neither be grasped nor understood, nor shaped, nor guided by man when it got into trouble. ”

“ Analogy prompts us to see in plants and animals products of physics and chemistry and organization, although the peculiarity of the product makes us recognize certain specificities of life not contained in the theory of mere physics and chemistry. All the facts of experience prompt us to see in mentation a biological function, and we are no longer surprised to find this product of integration so different from the nature and functions of all the component parts. ”

“ Without having to carry the burdens of the whole State with its sweeping and sometimes distant power and its forced economy, a semiprivate hospital like Bloomingdale aims to minister to a slightly select group, especially those who are in the difficult position of greater sensitiveness but moderate means in days of sickness. It serves the part of our community which more than any other sets the pace of the civilization about us—the intelligent aspiring workers who may not have reached the goal of absolute financial independence. ”

“ A second phase of great importance is that institutions like Bloomingdale have promoted the study of psychology far more than any other factor, particularly because in them the personality stripped of some of its intricacies, the diseased personality, permits analysis, which the normal complex has so long defied. That it is high time that mankind was undertaking this knowledge of himself is particularly emphasized by the unrest and aberrance of human behavior now startling and disturbing the whole world. ”

“ To come back to more concrete problems again, a wider grasp of what psychiatry may well furnish us helps toward a new ethical goal in our social conscience. The nineteenth century brought us the boon and the bane of industrialism. More and more of the pleasures and satisfactions of creation and production and of the natural rewards of the daily labor drifted away from the sight and control of the worker, who now rarely sees the completed result of his work as the farmer or the artisan used to do. Few workers have the experience of getting satisfaction from direct pride in the end result ”

“ The medical study and treatment of the mind is no longer so exclusively confined within the walls of institutions nor to the type or degree of disorder which necessitates compulsory seclusion. Psychiatry is extending out from the institutions into the communities by means of out-patient clinics and social workers, through newly created organized agencies, through informed individuals, physicians, nurses, and lay workers, and through the general spread of psychiatric knowledge. ”

“ Many a dream has been realized and many a dream has given way to another. Here and there the past may make itself felt too much. But the spirit and its growth show in recruiting ever-new lives to meet the present day and the days to come, and this all the more so if we can show the younger generation that every effort is likely to have its reasonable direct support. We all want a man like Dr. William L. Russell to have the fullest opportunity to bring to its best expression the rich and well-tried wisdom of over twenty-five years of devoted work in the field. ”

“ It is not so difficult to realize the mechanism by which a stimulus which clearly crosses the threshold of consciousness can lead to a given reaction. But it is perhaps difficult to imagine how so many stimuli which do not cross the threshold of consciousness or which, if they do, are not recognized by the patient at the time as having any reference whatever to the special memory can yet set the memory mechanism into action. ”

“ After studying in each patient all the non-mental disorders such as infections, intoxications, and the like, we can now also attack the problems of life which can be understood only in terms of plain and intelligible human relations and activities, and thus we have learned to meet on concrete ground the real essence of mind and soul—the plain and intelligible human activities and relations to self and others. ”

“ One of the evidences of the great progress of psychiatry is that we have learned to be more eager to see what is sane and strong and constructively valuable even in the strange notions of our patients, and less eager to call them queer and foolish. A delusion may contain another person's attempt at stating truth. The goal of psychiatry and of sound common sense is truth free of distortion. ”

“ The unfortunate feature was that they thought they had to start with a body not only with mind and soul left out but also with practical disregard of the whole natural setting. They studied little more than corpses and experimental animals, and many a critic wondered how such a corpse or a frog could ever show any mind, normal or abnormal. To get things balanced again, the vision of man had to expand to take a sane and practical view of all of human life—not only of its machinery. ”

“ The life and growth and happy self-realization of an institution is not the bricks and mortar—it is a living and elastic entity—never too stable, never too finished, a growing and plastic plant—to use a metaphor that has slipped in perhaps without arousing all the implications the term plant might carry and does carry. ”