DR. WILLIAM WHITNEY GODDING.

19

The editor of the Journal of Insanity, in summing up the results of Dr. Nichols's labors, says his plan of the new asylum was twenty-five years in advance of its time, and that the echelon plan, or receding front, was as great an improvement on the linear or Kirkbride plan as that was on the quadrangular. He organized and supervised the entire work, eking out the scanty appropriation by making bricks out of the very ground on which the building stood. He took up his own quarters in an unfinished bathroom of one of the wards, and set himself to cure the insane and to entertain visitors. The building was finished within the appropriation, a result that commended the superintendent to Congressional committees, and the plans were so excellent that they were copied not only in State institutions but also in Australia and in Newfoundland. During the quarter of a century that he spent at the head of St. Elizabeth he kept the institution abreast of the most enlightened curative treatment of the times.1

On the resignation of Dr. Nichols, in 1877, Dr. Godding returned to St. Elizabeth as superintendent, and took the place of executive and medical head of the institution, which he still holds."

Dr. Nichols, writing in the American Journal of Insanity of his successor, says that Dr. Godding entered upon his work at Washington with a harmonious staff, and with buildings in good order, but much crowded. During the twelve years he had been there [up to 1890] he had nearly doubled the capacity of the institution by the erection of four large buildings, one of them a separate hospital for the criminal insane, and by extending several old buildings, and making many beneficial changes and renovations in others. He established an efficiently working pathological laboratory; created an entirely new system of water supply from artesian wells; erected several important buildings for the economical and agricultural uses of the establishment. "It can not be said," continues Dr. Nichols, "that the Government Hospital for the Insane is perfect, or that it embraces every material agency for the care of the insane, but it may be questioned if there is any institution at home or abroad that is, at the present moment, better equipped for the exceedingly varied and extensive asylum service."

One other name well known and highly honored in Washington is

1 The American Journal of Insanity, vol. 45, contains a portrait and a sketch of Dr. Nichols, by Dr. Godding. See also the same publication, vol. 46, p. 410, and vol. 47, p. 231.

2 Dr. William Whitney Godding was born in Winchendon, Mass., in 1831; received the degree of bachelor of arts from Dartmouth College in 1845, and the degree of doctor of medicine from Castleton's Medical College, Vermont, in 1857. In about 1860 he became assistant physician in the New Hampshire State Asylum for the insane at Concord, under the elder Bancroft, when he resigned to engage in private practice in Fitchburg, Mass. In 1863 he became assistant physician at the Government Hospital for the Insane, serving seven years, when he was called to the superintendency of the Massachusetts Hospital for the Insane at Taunton, where he remained until he came to Washington, in 1877.

3 Vol. 46, p. 408.

connected preeminently with the Government Hospital for the Insane. Without making any invidious comparisons it may be said that next to the two superintendents, St. Elizabeth is most indebted to the late Dr. Joseph Meredith Toner. Dr. Toner's connection with Providence, Garfield, and Columbia hospitals has been mentioned elsewhere. He inspired the founding of St. Joseph's Male Orphan Asylum, and also the St. Vincent's and St. Ann's, and for more than twenty years he was on the board of visitors at St. Elizabeth. Dr. Toner's connection with the board antedated the return of Dr. Godding by one year, and in speaking of Dr. Toner's work the present superintendent says:

I found him ever ready to uphold my hands in every movement looking to more liberal provision or more enlightened hospital service. As president of my board, during the last ten years, it was often my privilege to consult with him, and he seemed always to hail my coming with delight. He was interested in every detail of management and construction. He took pains to inform himself of the purpose, the sites, the plans of all new buildings. He seemed fully to comprehend the ultimate aims of our hospital work, its magnitude and its inevitable growth. Our number of patients was below 800 when we began; it was more than 1,700 when we went away. I think the extent of the work and the possibilities of the hospital of the future grew upon both of us as the years went on. There was ever the urgent nced of the present with its daily work crowding upon us, but more and more the study came to be, not what would answer and be an evidence of progress in the present, but how broad foundations we might now be laying for that hospital for the future, of which we began to catch glimpses, and dimly to apprehend the work, that would be still going forward there, when Dr. Toner and the present superintendent were only fading outlines in the past. Often when I took to him the rough drafts of plans in their inception, he would enter heartily upon their study, and, not by officious suggestion but by tentative query, he would make known the trend of his own thought, which was always well worth considering. "Could you add a few feet here? Build as large as you can for we shall need it," he would say, and I often profited by the prompting, even while waiting for another year's appropriation to complete it. It was his wont to come often to St. Elizabeth, not alone that he might satisfy himself of the integrity of the work being done there, but because he wanted to see for himself and felt a personal interest in the inmates and their life within those inclosures, inmates to whose appeals he was tender as a father.1

1 Dr. Joseph Meredith Toner was born in Pittsburg, Pa., April 30, 1825. He received a classical education at the Western Pennsylvania University and at St. Mary's College; and a medical education at the Vermont Academy of Medicine and the Jefferson Medical College, at which latter institution he received his degree in 1853. He came to Washington in 1855, from Harpers Ferry. In 1873 he was president of the American Medical Association and in 1874 was president of the American Public Health Association. In 1871 he endowed the Toner Medical Lectures, consisting of two lectures annually on some new fact valuable to medical science. In 1882 he presented his valuable library of 28,000 books and 18,000 pamphlets to the Government, and it now forms the Toner Collection in the Library of Congress.-Washington Evening Star, August 1, 1896.

The National Medical Review for December, 1896, contains the proceedings of the memorial meeting of the Medical Society of the District of Columbia in honor of Joseph Meredith Toner, M. D., held October 21, 1896. The president of the society, Dr. S. C. Busey, spoke briefly of Dr. Toner's work. Remarks were made by Dr. Godding, Dr. C. H. A. Kleinschmidt, and Dr. J. Dudley Morgan.