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Transcribed and submitted by Linda Talbott
for the USGenNet Data Repository http://www.us-data.org/
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Formatted by USGenNet Data Repository Chief Archivist, Linda Talbott
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Fourteenth Biennial Report of the
Board of State Commissioners of Public Charities
of the State of Illinois
Presented to the Governor December 1, 1896


         [p. 83]
         
         COOK COUNTY
         - Detention Hospital -
         
         Patients are brought to this hospital for security pending a
       legal inquiry as to their mental condition. They are often in a
       state of acute mania, a condition demanding medical care and good
       nursing. While the Board believe that the conduct of this hospital
       has somewhat improved, it cannot be considered as adequate.
       
         The detention hospital should be under precisely the same
       nursing charge as in Cook County Hospital. It should be under the
       medical charge of physicians who are specialists in mental disease,
       and should be visited daily in turn by at least two such physicians.
       If this were done it would render natural and easy the change from
       jury trials to inquiries by commission in Cook county, and that,
       too, without consuming more time than the present plan. The county
       judge has the right under law to appoint as commissioners in lunacy
       two qualified physicians in regular and active practice, when no
       jury trial is demanded or appears to the judge to be necessary.
       By appointing as such commissioners doctors who should serve for
       a period of ninety days, less or more, visiting the hospital daily
       during their term, and thus seeing each patient repeatedly, a medi-
       cal decision in each case could be secured which would be of real
       value, and if presented to the judge would certainly facilitate
       rather than retard the proper disposition of these cases. Such
       medical attendance combined with the nursing of a sick ward would
       doubtless result in the cure of some acute cases without recourse
       to a State hospital.
       
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