The York Retreat

In 1790 William Tuke, a York Quaker, learned that Hannah Mills had died in the York Asylum. Two years later, after the Quarterly Meeting of Friends at York, he asked those present to hear a proposal: an institution run by Friends for members of the Society who had lost their reason, whatever their means.

Friends resolved to go ahead in 1793. They bought land about half a mile from the city walls and began building in 1794, planning room for thirty patients. The Retreat opened in 1796. An early report counted nine men and fourteen women in the house. Eight paid the lowest rate of four shillings a week, and the rest paid from eight shillings to a guinea.

William's grandson Samuel Tuke described the regime in his Description of the Retreat of 1813. Neither chains nor corporal punishment were tolerated on any pretext, and chains had never been permitted there. Fear still had a place, but only as much as the ordinary rules of the household raised. Violent patients might be confined in a strait-waistcoat, and patients were offered work, amusements and books suited to them. Dr Delarive of Geneva, who visited in 1798 and described the house in a letter to the Bibliothèque Britannique, found that it looked less like a prison than a large rural farm, with a garden and no bars or grating on the windows.

In 1820, aged 88 and almost blind, William Tuke handed the management to Samuel. The Bethlem Museum of the Mind dates the wide adoption of moral treatment in England to the late 1830s, beginning at Hanwell Asylum. The Retreat's incoming letters from 1796 to 1905, about 100,000 items in 169 boxes, are part of its archive at the Borthwick Institute in York.