Trenton Psychiatric Hospital

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The Trenton Psychiatric Hospital is a state run mental hospital located in Trenton and Ewing, New Jersey.

It previously operated under the name New Jersey State Hospital at Trenton and originally as the New Jersey State Lunatic Asylum.

Founded by Dorothea Lynde Dix on May 15, 1848, it was the first public mental hospital in the state of New Jersey.

Under the Hospital's first superintendent, Dr. Horace A. Buttolph, the hospital admitted and treated 86 patients.

In 1907, Dr. Henry Cotton became the medical director. Believing that infections were the key to mental illness, he had his staff remove teeth and various other body parts that might become infected from the hospital patients.

Cotton's legacy of hundreds of fatalities and thousands of maimed and mutilated patients did not end with his leaving Trenton in 1930 or his death in 1933; in fact, removal of patients' teeth at the Trenton asylum was still the norm until 1960.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] See also

• Kirkbride Plan
• Henry Cotton (doctor)
• Willowbrook State School
• Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital, the second "lunatic asylum" opened in New Jersey (1876).

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• http://www.rootsweb.com/~asylums/trenton_nj/
• http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/156/12/1982
• http://www.forgottenphotography.com