Excerpt from Reports of the Trustees and Superintendent of the Butler Hospital Presented to the Corporation at Its Seventy-Seventh Annual Meeting: January 26, 1921, Providence, R. I

In the report of the Trustees written by the Sec retary and presented at the annual meeting held a year ago the duty of maintaining at Butler Hospital an adequate research department, through which should be carried on a systematic study of the causesof mental disease, was strongly and eloquently im pressed upon the members of the corporation. This report was the report of the Trustees and every mem ber of the Board endorses its recommendation that the Hospital should to the utmost of its ability join in the endeavor, now happily becoming general on the part of institutions like our own, to ascertain the causes underlying mental disease and to discover and apply the appropriate prevention.

Butler Hospital we must perhaps admit, has not a complete and adequate research department. It is not doing all that it would like to do to contribute its share to the ascertaining of the underlying causes of mental disease. We have not the corps of phy sicians which such a study would demand. The physicians whom we have devote a large portion of their time to the care of a great number of patients whom they know they can not cure and whose cases are comparatively valueless for the purposes of re search. The only way in which they could find time for the study to which they would like to devote themselves would be to transfer such patients to the State Institutions, and to sternly refuse to receive those who require little more than custodial atten tion. This raises again the old question as to how much such an institution as ours owes, on the one hand, to humanity at large and to the medical pro fession, and how much it owes, on the other hand, to merely stricken men and women and their scarcely less stricken relatives. It would be a relief to the Trustees and to the staff and it would conduce to the standing and reputation of the Hospital if we couldpronounce forthwith the verdict that our first duty is to humanity at large and to future generations, who might by the study and research and experi ments of our physicians escape the threat of mental disease which now menaces them, and that to perform this duty we could well justify ourselves in washing our hands of the aged, the imbecile and the incurable who now clog the wards of the Hospital, and who could be cared for elsewhere, but this we cannot do. The community to which we appeal, and whom to serve is our first duty, would not sanction it, however much it might add to the standing of the Hospital.

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