Detached group No. 4 is designed for both men and women, and will accommodate 150.  A wholly different classification is here provided for, the actively industrious classes being intended for this group.  Those who are able to do outdoor work, and for whom some diverting employment will be beneficial in making them contented and physically healthy, will live here.  There is complete separation of day rooms, but the two sexes will dine together in an associate hall.

An amusement hall to harmonize with the central group, and to be built adjacent to it, is planned, and will be built this year if the appropriation will permit.  It is a valuable and necessary adjunct to the other provisions for the care of a population of 1,500.  Accommodations for entertainments, chapel exercises, dancing and a bathing establishment are included in the plans in a way that gives great results with great economy of construction.

Probably the feature in the scheme of the St. Lawrence State Hospital of the greatest popular and professional interest is Dr. Wise’s plan to have there an Americanized and improved Gheel.  The original Gheel in Belgium is a colony where for many years lunatics have been sent for domiciliary care.  Its inhabitants, mostly of the peasant class, have grown accustomed to the presence and care of patients with disordered minds.  The system is the outgrowth of a superstition founded in the presumed miraculous cure of a lunatic whose reason was restored by the shock of the sight of the killing of a beautiful girl by her pursuing father, whose fury had been roused by her choice of a husband.  A monument to this unfortunate graces Gheel, and as St. Dymphna she is supposed to be in benign control of the lunatic-sheltering colony.  Some of the features of the Gheel system of care are also distinctively known as the Scotch system.  There the placing of patients in family care is common.  Massachusetts has also adopted it to a considerable extent.  But there are many objections to family care in isolated domiciles, as practiced in Massachusetts.  Special medical attention and official visits are made expensive and inconvenient.  Dr. Wise plans to get all the advantages of such a mode of life for patients whose condition retrogrades under institutional influence.  Not the least of these advantages is that of economy in relieving the State from the per capita cost of construction for at least one-fourth of the insane of the district.  He would utilize the families in the settlement which always grows up in the vicinity of a large hospital.  It is composed of the households of employes, many of which are the result of marriages among the attendants and employes.  On Point Airy, by the use of the buildings that were on the different plots bought by the State to make up the hospital farm, such a settlement can be easily made up.  Its inhabitants would pay rent to the State.  They would be particularly fit and proper persons to board and care for patients whose condition was suitable for that sort of a life, and the patients could have many privileges and benefits not possible in the hospital.  Point Airy’s little Gheel on such a plan would be a most interesting and valuable extension of the beneficent rule of St. Dymphna.