OUTLINE OF A PLAN FOR AN EPILEPTIC COLONY.* 
By FREDERICK PETERSON, M.D., 
Attending Physician to the New York Hospital for the Nervous and Epileptic; Chief of Clinic, 
Nervous Department, College of Physicians and Surgeons. 
[Reprinted from the N. Y. Medical Journal July 23, 1892.] 
It is a great pleasure to come before this board at the invita- 
tion of Mr. Letchworth and of your President, Mr. Craig, to 
speak to you upon a subject in which I have been deeply and 
earnestly interested and engrossed for five or six years, knowing 
that the law in this State has been passed, and that you are a com- 
mission appointed under that law, not only to select a site and 
prepare plans for an epileptic institution, but to prepare those 
plans on the colony system, with a view not only to the care- 
taking of this class, but to their education and their instruction in 
different trades and callings. 
In this work we must lose site of the word “institution” if 
possible. We must rather think of some small village. The 
less it is like an institution the better. There should be no very 
large buildings, nor should there be a symmetrical arrangement 
of the pavilions, cottages, workshops, etc., such as has been 
made at Gallipolis, Ohio. Although the ideas as to the character 
of an epileptic retreat, su h as I have always maintained and 
frequently described in various papers, were carefully instilled 
by me into the Ohio commissioners who visited me in New 
York with their architect, and although my instructions were, in 
the main, followed in the distribution of buildings and the deter- 
mination of their character and purposes, yet it was not appar- 
ently possible for the architect to rid himself of the hospital, 
asylum, or institutional idea, and doubtless, too, the people in 
the vicinity were eager in demanding something imposing in the 
way of State architecture. 
1. The first point, then, to be borne in mind is that buildings 
should be arranged in a village or colony plan, separated entirely, 
often provided with their own little gardens, surrounded by 
hedges, so that they shall be as independent and home-like as 
possible. Though there should be system, in their arrangements, 
* Remarks made before the State Board of Charities, at Albany, N. Y., 
July 13, 1892. 2 
there should he no symmetry, such as would lead to their desig- 
nation as an asylum or an institution at first sight. 
2. The second point is to keep in mind the aims of the colony. 
(a) It is to he a home—a community of people cut off all their 
lives from ordinary social pleasures and pursuits by a malady 
that really robs them, in most cases but for a few moments each 
day, or week, or month, or several months, of their faculties. 
(h) It is to he a school. Denied education in public schools, 
the epileptic here receives such advantages as he requires, and 
each and every member of the colony, without regard to age, 
should be given the opportunity, if desired, of acquiring knowl- 
edge. 
(c) It is to he an industrial college. All useful trades and call- 
ings are to be conducted in this colony. Hence, provision for 
shops of various kinds must be made. 
(d) It is to he a hospital. That is, every patient will be treated 
for his disorder, and there will be one building set aside for such 
as are feeble-minded, or insane, or confined to bed. 
3. The third subject for consideration is the probable percent- 
age of the various classes Roughly speaking, we should pro- 
vide an observation building for new cases (five per cent.), hos- 
pital accommodation for say ten per cent., school buildings for 
fifteen per cent., and shops, residences, etc., for some seventy 
per cent, of workers. 
4. As to land, there should be from 300 to 400 acres or more, 
if possible, diversified but well adapted for agriculture, stock- 
raising, and the like. Out-of-door employment is one of the best 
means of treatment of epilepsy. 
5. The colony should be situated in the centre of population, 
because of ease of access for patients and advantages for the 
visitation of friends. But a far more important reason for placing 
it near the largest city of the State is to secure the services of a 
visiting board of those gentlemen who make a specialty of nerv- 
ous and mental diseases, and of an expert pathologist, who, 
together would make it one of the great objects of the colony to 
discover the cause and cure of a disease from which some 120,- 
000 people are suffering in the United States alone at the present 
time. 
6. Suggestions as to buildings and their arrangement: 
(a) The superintendent should have a private house to himself. 
(h) The observation wards (five per cent, of cases), the in- 
firmary wards (for the sick, infirm, demented and insane, 
amounting to ten per cent.), and the administration building 
could be combined advantageously. The observation wards 
are for new-comers, who must be examined and studied for 
weeks at a time in order to ascertain their character, their abil- 
ities, the nature of their secures, and the proper kind of treatment 
for them to undergo. Between these should be the administra- 
tion building, offices, rooms for one or two resident physicians, 
accommodation for members of a nurses' training school, etc. 
Back of these again, but connected by a corridor, are the hospital 3 
wards, to be arranged not only for those who are sick from 
ordinary illnesses, but also for those who are too feeble minded 
for work or who are insane. Great pains should be taken to 
isolate the wards for excited patients to such an extent that no 
one will be disturbed by them. These buildings should contain 
small dormitories and private rooms. In some part of the hos- 
pital should be a hydrotherapeutic chamber, with walls and floor 
impermeable to water, provided with rain-baths, hot boxes, cold 
plunge, douches and bath tubs. There should be separate 
kitchens and dining-rooms. 
(c) Remote from here a group of cottages for women, with 
extensive gardens for the raising of flowers, flower seeds, berries, 
bees, etc. 
(d) A group of cottages for men next to the gardener’s house. 
These are the men who work about the grounds, caring for the 
trees, lawns, hedges, paths and roads. The grounds will be 
made not only attractive, but instructive, for all trees and shrubs 
are to be labeled, and an effort should be made to establish not 
only a botanical garden but a zoological as well. 
(e) A school building should be provided for children of 
both sexes of tender years. It should be their residence as well, 
and the school conducted on the kindergarten plan. 
(f) A large school building for each sex, containing not only 
school and recitation rooms, but rooms for studying music, 
drawing, designing, architecture, modeling, and the like, also 
rooms for teachers and some of the pupils. 
(g) A museum, lecture-room, library, reading-room, and 
gymnasium, with a swimming-bath, might be advantageously 
combined in one building. 
(h) A chapel. 
(z) Stables for cows, sheep, pigs, horses, and dairy, with 
cottages for men detailed to see to the work required in this 
department. 
(j) A farmer’s house, with a group of cottages for men 
engaged in farm work. 
(k) Shops For men: i. Tailors, shoemakers and saddlers 
in one building. 2. Carpenters, painters and glaziers, furniture- 
makers and upholsterers in one building 3. Blacksmiths, iron- 
founders, tinners and locksmiths in one building. 4. Printers, 
bookbinders, etc., in one building. For women: Sewing-room, 
dressmaking, millinery, fancy work, etc., in one or two build- 
ings. Bed-rooms may be combined with some of these buildings, 
the object being to scatter the residents as much as possible. 
(/) A central kitchen, bakery and store-room, combined with 
a cottage or two for the women who work here. From this 
central kitchen may be sent out to the various houses the chief 
articles of diet, which should always be simple—bread, mushes, 
milk, eggs and various groceries, soups and meat once daily. 
Every cottage, however, should have its own dining-room and 
small kitchen for reheating some foods and for light cooking. 
{m) Laundry, wash-room, ironing-room, mending-room, 4 
with a residence for those women who are occupied in this 
department. 
(n) A pathological laboratory of the most recent design 
fully equipped with everything requisite for good scientific work. 
This laboratory to be in connection with the mortuary and 
remote from other buildings. A cottage not far away, for the 
residence of the pathologist, would be necessary. 
While I have endeavored to delineate as well as possible the 
needs of a model epileptic colony, there are many things not 
mentioned here that will develop with the gradual evolution of 
the colony. For instance, if the land is such that quarries exist 
upon it, or that brick may be manufactured, a new industry 
would arise, requiring its particular cluster of buildings for work 
and residence. 
The buildings that I have enumerated reach the figure of 
about thirty. The Bielefeld colony, with a thousand patients, 
had fifty-five buildings at the time of my visit several years ago. * 
With the exception of the observation and hospital building, 
none of the buildings need be specially planned to meet the 
wants of epileptics. They should be as much as possible like 
ordinary houses. 
The ventilation should be by fireplaces and windows, as in 
ordinary town and country houses. 
Each residence should have, if possible, a simple rain-bath, 
up-stair dormitories and bed-rooms, with a sitting-room, small 
kitchen and dining-room below. 
It will doubtless be of advantage to make all buildings fire- 
proof. 
All the buildings need not be constructed at once. A com- 
munity of this kind cannot be provided for in a moment. It 
must grow into a colony by a sort of evolution, its wants being 
supplied as they become manifest, through the intelligent 
direction of its superintendent and trustees. The inhabitants of 
this colony will in time be able to erect their own buildings as 
required. 
And now a word or two as regards commitment. All patients 
under age can be sent by their parents, just as they would send 
children to boarding schools, transferring their parental authority 
for the time being to the officers and teachers of the colony. 
All other patients are to be voluntary denizens of the colony, 
except such as through mental impairment of any kind require 
confinement in the infirmary; and with these last the ordinary 
procedures taken in lunacy cases should be carried out, formally 
committing them to the infirmary of the colony. 
201 West Fifty-fourth Street. 
* The Bielefeld Epileptic Colony. Med. Record, April 23, 1877.—The 
Colonization of Epileptics. Journ. of Nervous and Mental Disease, Decem- 
ber, 1889.—A Plea for the Epileptic. N. Y. State Charities Record, August, 
1890.—Progress in the Care and Colonization of Epileptics. Journ. of 
Nervous and Mental Disease, August, 1892.