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Thomas Kirkbride, M.D. From the collections of the National Library of Medicine.

Thomas Story Kirkbride was born July 31, 1809 into a Quaker family in Morrisville, Pennsylvania. He began a study of medicine under a Dr. Nicholas Belleville, of Trenton, New Jersey, when he was eighteen. After receiving a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1832, Kirkbride originally sought to become a surgeon. However, in 1840 an offer to become superintendent of the newly established Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane was presented to him. He accepted for largely practical reasons. His training and experience interning at Friends' Asylum and at Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Hospital provided him with the necessary background for the position. As Superintendent he became one of the most prominent authorities on mental health care in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

In 1844, Kirkbride was a founding member of the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane (AMSAII) — forerunner of the American Psychiatric Association — serving first as secretary, then later as president from 1862 to 1870. Kirkbride promoted a standardized method of asylum construction and mental health treatment, popularly known as the Kirkbride Plan, which significantly influenced the entire American asylum community during his lifetime.

Kirkbride's influential work, On the Construction, Organization, and General Arrangements of Hospitals for the Insane with Some Remarks on Insanity and Its Treatment, was published in 1854, and again in 1880. Kirkbride had been influenced by the Quaker-founded York Retreat in England whose leader, Samuel Tuke, had published an account entitled, Practical Hints on the Construction and Economy of Pauper Lunatic Asylums (York, England, 1815). The Tuke family had instituted in their hospital a "moral treatment" approach to care for patients, which centered upon humane and kindly behavior. The Superintendents’ Association made efforts to institute this approach in their hospitals.

With his patients, Kirkbride aroused enough animosity in one to inspire attempted murder (which Kirkbride narrowly escaped). More often his patients appreciated him. In an extreme example, Dr. Kirkbride actually married a former patient after his first wife passed away.^[1]

He died in Philadelphia, December 16, 1883.

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1. ^ http://www.kirkbridebuildings.com/about/kirkbride.html Retrieved Sept. 23, 2006