Physicians agree that the prime requisite in the treatment of these disorders is the removal of the patient from his or her habitual surroundings, where recognition of the existence of actual disease is generally wanting, where the constant admonitions of well-meaning friends to “brace up” and to “exert your will power” force the sick man or woman to bodily and mental over-exertion, and where the worries about a livelihood are always dominant.  Such a change alone, however, the experts say, will help but few, for it is being recognized more and more that these functional diseases of the nervous system can receive satisfactory treatment only in institutions, where constant attention may be had, with expert supervision and trained attendants.

The “occupation and exercise cure” is applicable also to epilepsy, and is the therapeutic principle of the Craig Colony for Epileptics at Sonyea, in Livingston County, supported by the State, and that institution furnishes a general model for the “colony sanatoriums” suggested for indigent patients suffering from functional nervous disorders.  The Craig Colony was the idea of Dr. Frederick Peterson, Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University, and former President of the New York State Commission of Lunacy and of the New York Neurological Society, which he based upon the epileptic colony at Beilefeld, Germany, that was founded in 1867.  The Craig Colony was founded in 1894, and there are now being cared for within its confines more than thirteen hundred patients, who have turned out this year agricultural products, with bricks, soap, and brooms, to the value of $60,000.  The colony is named after the late Oscar Craig, of Rochester, who, with William P. Letchworth, of Buffalo, purchased the two-thousand-acre tract of land on which it is situated from the Shaker colony at Sonyea and presented it to the State, Dr. Peterson devoting several months of each year for nine years to getting the institution into working order.  The first patients were housed in the old Shaker buildings, which were well constructed and fairly well arranged for the purpose, but as additional applications for admission have been made new buildings have been erected.  To-day there are eighty buildings in the colony, but a thousand patients are waiting for admission, eight hundred of whom are in New York City.

Epilepsy, the “falling sickness,” is a most difficult malady to treat even in an institution for that purpose, and it is impossible to treat it anywhere else.  An epileptic in a family is an almost intolerable burden to its other members, as well as to himself.  The temperamental effect of the disease takes the form in the patient of making frequent and unjust complaints, and epileptics invariably charge some one with having injured them while they have been unconscious during an attack.  Then, too, living at home, they are often dangerous to younger members of a family, and they are fault-finding, exacting, and irritable generally.  The seizures frequently come on without warning, and the patient drops where he stands, often injuring himself severely.  The last annual report of the Craig Colony records more than four hundred injuries within the year to patients during seizures which required a surgeon’s attention, the injuries varying from severe bruises to fractures of the skull.