in 1780 treatment of patients at the williamsburg va hospital was designed to
Eastern State Hospital (Virginia) Eastern State Hospital, built in 1773 in colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, was the first public facility in the present-day United States constructed solely for the care and treatment of the mentally ill. The hospital's patients were moved in the 20th century to a new facility outside Williamsburg. The original building had burned but was reconstructed in 1985. Today it operates as a museum about the treatment of mental illness.
History of hospitals In ancient cultures, religion and medicine were linked. The earliest documented institutions aiming to provide cures were ancient Egyptian temples. In ancient Greece, temples dedicated to the healer-god Asclepius, known as Asclepieia (Ancient Greek: Ἀσκληπιεῖα, sing. Asclepieion, Ἀσκληπιεῖον), functioned as centres of medical advice, prognosis, and healing.[1] At these shrines, patients would enter a dream-like state of induced sleep known as enkoimesis (ἐγκοίμησις) not unlike anesthesia, in which they either received guidance from the deity in a dream or were cured by surgery.[2] Asclepeia provided carefully controlled spaces conducive to healing and fulfilled several of the requirements of institutions created for healing.[3] In the Asclepieion of Epidaurus, three large marble boards dated to 350 BCE preserve the names, case histories, complaints, and cures of about 70 patients who came to the temple with a problem and shed it there. Some of the surgical cures listed, such as the opening of an abdominal abscess or the removal of traumatic foreign material, are realistic enough to have taken place, but with the patient in a state of enkoimesis induced with the help of soporific substances such as opium.[2] The worship of Asclepius was adopted by the Romans. Under his Roman name Æsculapius, he was provided with a temple (291 BCE) on an island in the Tiber in Rome, where similar rites were performed.[4]