Moral treatment in asylums and general hospitals in 19th-century America

Moral treatment, a therapeutic approach that emphasized character and spiritual development, and called for kindness on the part of all who came in contact with the patient, flourished in American mental hospitals during the first half of the 19th century. Many of its essential features also existed then in the treatment of physical illness in American general hospitals. Changing social and welfare services and advances in scientific medicine contributed to a subsequent decline in moral treatment and to a divergence between the therapeutic approaches of the two kinds of hospitals. In recent years, there has been a gradual convergence in their treatment modes. Contemporary social and welfare services are contrasted with traditional moral treatment.