Richard Sprigg Steuart

Dr Richard Sprigg Steuart (1797- 1876) was a Maryland physician and an early pioneer of the treatment of mental illness. He was instrumental in the expansion and modernisation of The Maryland Hospital for the Insane, now known as the Spring Grove Hospital Center. Spring Grove continues to treat mental illness today, and is the second oldest institution of its kind in the United States.

Steuart was born in Baltimore in November 1797, younger son of the physician Dr James Steuart, and was educated at St Mary's College. During the War of 1812 he volunteered as commissary to the company of his brother, Major General George H. Steuart, and served at the Battle of North Point, where his father was also present as a volunteer surgeon.

After the war, Steuart began the study of medicine under Sir William Donaldson in 1818, graduating in 1822. Early on he began to specialise in the relatively neglected field of mental illness, while maintaining a substantial general medical practice in Baltimore.

His most notable contribution to the field was his work for the Maryland Hospital for the Insane (originally founded in 1797), where he became President of the Board and Medical Superintendent. The Hospital had become neglected and run down by the mid-nineteenth century, and Steuart managed to obtain authorization and funding from the Maryland General Assembly for the construction of the new facility at Spring Grove. He chaired the committee that selected the Hospital's present site in Catonsville, and he personally contributed $1,000 towards the purchase of the land in 1853.

In 1842 Steuart gave up his general medical practice in order to concentrate on farming the family estate which he inherited at Dodon, Maryland, comprising around 1600 acres of land and about 150 slaves.

Civil War

The outbreak of of the Civil War in 1864 found Steuart sympathetic to the Southern cause, though Maryland did not secede from the Union (pre-war loyalties in Maryland were divided between North and South, but the Northern cause prevailed). Horses were raised and trained at Dodon then smuggled south for Confederate forces, as well as medical supplies such as quinine. As a result, Dodon was often raided by Union troops, frequently forcing Steuart to flee into hiding.

Steuart's support for the Confederacy came at a political cost. He was relieved of his duties at the Hospital after he refused to sign an oath of loyalty to the Union. He was however eventually reinstated in 1868, and he was Superintendent when the Hospital moved its operations to Spring Grove in 1872.

He died in 1876.

References

• Official Dodon website and history of the estate
• History of Spring Grove Hospital Center
• Letter to John Carey by Richard Sprigg Steuart on the subject of slavery
• Richardson. Hester Dorey, Side-Lights on Maryland History: With Sketches of Early Maryland Families, Genealogical Publishing Com, 1995, ISBN 0806302968, 9780806302966.
• Nelker, Gladys P., The Clan Steuart, 1970.