The Earle family : Ralph Earle and his descendants

Igen.] genealogy. 113
:
Ito profit by his counsels ; and they will provide that his rooms shall
,
always be open and ready for his use."
Hitherto, consequently, the hospital has been his home, but he has
ipassed the summer months in the neighborhood of his boyhood, in
{Leicester.
In 1 87 1 he went a third time to Europe, and visited forty-six
jhospitals and asylums for the insane in Ireland, Austria, Italy and
Ithe intervening countries. More than one hundred and forty institu-
tions of that kind, in America and Europe, have come under his
personal observation.
In the winter of 1840-41, while at the Frankford asylum, he
delivered before the patients a course of lectures on natural philoso-
phy, illustrated by experiments in pneumatics and electricity. This
was the first known attempt to address an audience of the insane in
any discourse other than a sermon, and has led to that system of
entertainments for the patients now considered indispensable in a
first class hospital. In the official year 1866-67, at the Northampton
Hospital, to assemblies including an average of over two hundred
and fifty of the patients, he gave a series of six lectures on diseases
of the brain accompanied by mental derangement,— the first and
apparently only time that such an audience ever listened to discourses
upon their own malady. In this instance they were favorably
received, and they would have been repeated in subsequent years,
had the want of the necessary leisure from other duties not prevented.
He has published many articles upon insanity and other subjects,
most of them in the "Journal of Insanity," and the "American
Journal of the Medical Sciences," and some of them have been issued
in book or pamphlet form. His paper on "The Inability to Distin-
guish Colors " was printed many years prior to the publication of the
valuable work on that subject by Dr. B. Joy Jeffries. His last book,
Ipublished by the Lippincott Company, of Philadelphia, and entitled
" The Curability of Insanity," was mostly taken from his annual
reports of the hospital at Northampton, of which he wrote twenty-
two. A reviewer of it says : " This book may mark an epoch in the
literature of insanity; since it has changed the whole front of that
literature, and set in motion investigating forces which will carry out
its main doctrine into, many useful details, upon which the veteran
I author has not dwelt."
*5