Local doctor helped mentally ill in the 1840s

Aug. 11--One of Illinois' pioneer psychiatrists played a role in two Jacksonville medical institutions in the 1840s.

This medical doctor was Edward Mead, who was born in England in 1819 and came to the United States in 1831.

He studied medicine in Ohio and Europe and around 1842 settled in or near St. Charles, west of Chicago.

"During the years he lived in the country west of Chicago, he carried on an extensive practice among the settlers," a Mead biographer wrote. "He was called on to do all sorts of medical and surgical work in the primitive cabins without assistance. The roads were often only trails, and travel was usually on horseback. ... He had the excitement on at least one occasion of being chased for many miles by wolves."

While studying medicine, Mead developed an interest in the mentally ill, and he tried to help them after he began practicing medicine in Illinois.

Mead was appalled by the living conditions of so-called "insane persons." The mentally ill were sometimes sent to county poorhouses or kept in filthy "pens" that had no protection from insects and the elements.

In 1845, Mead accepted a position on the faculty of the Illinois College Medical School in Jacksonville. Dr. Carl Black, a longtime Jacksonville physician and medical historian, wrote that one of the reasons Mead was chosen to teach at the local medical school was because of his interest in treating the mentally ill.

Even before Mead arrived in Jacksonville, local civic leaders such as Judge William Thomas and lawyer-politician John J. Hardin had been working to establish a mental hospital in the town.

Jacksonville proponents of the plan to build such an institution found an outspoken ally in Mead for their campaign. Mead made several speeches explaining the need to properly care for and treat the mentally ill in Illinois.

Later in 1845, Mead and other members of the IC Medical School faculty were named to a committee to develop plans for having a private mental hospital built in Jacksonville. However, when those plans failed, the committee turned to the Illinois Legislature for help.

To ensure success with legislators, a local businessman contacted Dorothea Dix, a well-known reformer who had helped establish institutions for the mentally ill, the deaf and the blind in the East and the South.

Dix assisted the Jacksonville delegation in its appeal to the legislature to establish a state mental hospital in Jacksonville. The hospital, which originally was known as the Illinois State Hospital for the Insane, was founded in 1847 and began treating patients in 1851.

Black, however, believed that Dix and Mead played lesser roles in bringing the mental hospital to Jacksonville than they have been given credit for.

"The admirers of Dr. Mead overlook the fact that his invitation to the Medical School in Jacksonville was, in part, to secure his aid in forwarding a project on which the members of the faculty of that school, and influential citizens of the community, were well advanced," Black wrote. "His main effort in Jacksonville was to secure the establishing of a private [mental] institution of which he probably expected to be the head, and when that project failed, he left the community."

Mead resigned his professorship at IC's Medical School in 1847 and moved to Chicago to open a private mental hospital. After managing the Chicago hospital for a few years, Mead taught obstetrics at the Cincinnati College of Medicine and Surgery.

Later, he founded mental hospitals in Cincinnati and Massachusetts. In 1883, Mead drowned when his ship wrecked on the coast of Pico Island in the Azores.

This Way We Were story was first published Oct. 18, 2004.

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