History
The Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, founded by public subscription, opened to "private and pauper lunatics" on 1 August 1838. The hospital was built on land once owned by the Cluniac Priory of St Andrew's. Donations were given for the establishment of a building for the "care of the insane" including from the funds of the disbanded Northamptonshire Yeomanry and a gift from the second Earl Spencer.
Thomas Octavius Prichard was appointed as the hospital’s first medical superintendent: he was one of the pioneers of "moral management", the humane treatment of the mentally ill. The asylum was originally intended to house 70 patients, "private and pauper", and was made a charitable trust. By the mid-1840s St Andrew's was caring for over 260 people; by 1860 this had risen to 317 and five years later to 414; in 1869 there were 40 nurses and attendants caring for 450 patients.
In 1876, a separate County Lunatic Asylum for pauper patients was opened in Northampton and the original General Lunatic Asylum changed its name to Northampton General Lunatic Asylum for the Middle and Upper Classes. It was renamed St Andrew's Hospital for mental diseases in 1887.
At the foundation of the National Health Service, St Andrew's sought exemption and was one of four Registered Psychiatric Hospitals allowed to function outside the NHS, maintaining its charitable status.
Many of the hospital buildings enjoy Listed Building status including the Hospital Chapel which was designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott and opened in 1863.
Read more about this topic: St Andrew's Hospital
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of literature—take the net result of Tiraboshi, Warton, or Schlegel,—is a sum of a very few ideas, and of very few original tales,—all the rest being variation of these.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Spain is an overflow of sombreness ... a strong and threatening tide of history meets you at the frontier.”
—Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)
“The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)