SKETCH 
OF 
Chas. H. Nichols, M. D., LL. D. 
by L, 
W. W. G. 
FROM 
American journal of Ensamtg, 
January, 1889. 
UTICA, N. Y. NOTMAN PHOTO CO., BOSTON, MASS. CHARLES HENRY NICHOLS. 
He whose picture forms the frontispiece of the 
present number of our journal has stood so long 
in the front rank of Americau superintendents of 
institutions for the insane, has been associated 
with so much of their work in the past, and is 
still so active in it that to most of our readers he 
needs no introduction. 
We do not purpose here to enter upon a full 
estimate of his life and services, which despite 
the fashion of the hour seems to us out of place, 
except in memoir—may the time for that be far 
distant!—but rather to give such brief outline of 
his work and such salient points of his character 
that those seeing the picture may recognize the 
man. 
Dr. Nichols was born in Maine in 1820. His 
academic training was in the schools of his native 
State and at Providence, K. I. His medical edu- 
cation was in the Universities of New York and 
Pennsylvania, graduating from the medical de- 
partment of the latter in 1843. His tutorage in 2 
ministering to the insane was under Dr. Amariah 
Brigham in the State Asylum at Utica, N. Y., 
where he was chosen medical assistant in 1847. 
In 1849 he was appointed physician to the 
Bloomingdale Asylum in New York City, a 
position he resigned in 1852. 
While still a young man in the thirty-second 
year of his age he was mentioned by Miss Dix 
and selected by President Fillmore to superintend 
the construction and take charge of the Govern- 
ment Hospital for the Insane at Washington, 
D. C. It was a great work, demanding a capable, 
broad man, every way, and the way that he ad- 
ministered his trust showed that the President 
had made no mistake in his choice. Men enough 
can be found to follow, but those with the power, 
to originate are few. In entering upon his duties 
Dr. Nichols found that the appropriation with 
which he was expected to purchase a site and 
complete the hospital was only one hundred and 
twenty thousand dollars. He took what there 
was and went to work. He abated not one jot 
from his high ideal, he curtailed in no respect the 
fair proportions of that model hospital, which, 
nowhere laid down in books, but differing from 
and better than any hitherto known, existed only 3 
in the fertile and comprehensive brain, of the 
young man who then and there went resolutely 
about building it. There were local prejudices 
to be overcome, a public sentiment in favor of the 
hospital to be created, and the insane of the army 
and navy to be provided for in a manner befitting 
a nation’s largess. Selecting, he purchased a 
site—in this he had the aid of Miss Dix—of two 
hundred acres overlooking the Capitol and the 
Potomac, a site to-day unrivalled by that of any 
hospital in the United States. Much of the 
appropriation went that way, but in this he was 
looking to the end, and he was right. Having 
his plan displayed on paper, a plan twenty-five 
years in advance of its time, known as the 
echelon or receding front, as great an improve- 
ment on the linear or Kirkbride plan as that was 
on the quadrangular. With what remained of 
the appropriation he began to build, not the 
centre building, but the extreme wing. Again 
he was looking to the end and he was right. 
Organizing and overseeing everything as is his 
wont, working day and night, eking out the 
scanty appropriation by making bricks out of the 
very ground on which the buildings stood, he 
finished the wing and also found means to con- 4 
struct a well appointed lodge for the colored 
insane, thereby creating the first distinct provision 
for that class ever made, a provision so wise that 
it was afterwards copied in many of the Southern 
States. Still looking to the end he took the 
unfinished bath-room of a future ward for his 
own lodging, opened the hospital to the insane, 
set himself to care for and to cure them and asked 
everybody to come and see. Congressmen, won- 
dering at a building finished within the appropri- 
ation, came to look. They were State rights 
members, opposed on principle to the construction 
of any national work, and therefore prepared to 
vote against extending the hospital. And the 
doctor showed them everything, what they had 
themselves done there for the insane, and what in 
justice to themselves remained to be done. It 
was not for himself but for these afflicted ones 
that he was asking, and in his pleading their cause 
was glorified. Whoever has heard Dr. Nichols 
on hospital topics will understand this. And 
those members believed in him because he had 
faith in himself and in his work that it was 
worthy. Going away from that lesson, out of an 
open window of the upper ward came the clear 
sweet voice of one of the female inmates singing 5 
the familiar words in opera— 
“ Then you’ll remember me.” 
Of old was it said that the stars in their courses 
fought for the right, and this poor girl’s singing 
went with them to their committee room, enforc- 
ing the doctor’s argument, and they voted the 
appropriation, and the hospital was finished 
according to the original plan. He had looked 
to the end to some purpose; an end that justified 
all his labor of love that built twenty-five of the 
best years of his life into those hospital walls. 
He saw his plan reproduced in Australia, in 
Newfoundland, and in many State institutions. 
At considerable pecuniary sacrifice to himself he 
doubled the hospital lands, he extended its ac- 
commodations, he kept the institution in every- 
thing abreast of the most enlightened curative 
treatment of the time, so that when after a quar- 
ter of a century they called him back to the 
Bloomingdale asylum, creating the office of 
medical superintendent for him, he left at St. 
Elizabeth a hospital of which one might be par- 
doned for being proud. 
At Bloomingdale he has gone on organizing 
and building and doing for the best. interests of 6 
the insane with the same high ideals and the 
same indomitable zeal that have always charac- 
terized his work. It is only what we should 
expect from our knowledge of the man. 
His life has come to deserved honors. He 
held for a succession of years the position of 
president of the Association of American Super- 
intendents of Institutions for the Insane, and is 
an honorary member of the Medico-Psychological 
Association of Great Britain; has received the 
honorary degree of Master of Arts from Union 
College of New York, and that of Doctor of 
Laws from the Columbia University at Washing- 
ton. These are but the stamp of that nobility of 
which his life is the constant exponent, a life 
generous in its impulses and lofty in its aims. 
Taking broad and scientific views of everything, 
he has been singularly free from the jealousy that 
would detract from the achievements of others, 
showing a spirit of magnanimity toward his 
enemies, and for those whom he counts as his 
friends, and their name is legion, a devotion most 
loving and loyal for which friendship is no name. 
He writes well, and an article now and then 
from his pen makes us wish he would write more. 
In the jurisprudence of insanity those who remember the Mary Harris case do not need to be 
told how he stands. But his principal work as 
with all successful superintendents of institutions 
for the insane has been in the daily hospital 
routine whose record is silent but for its results. 
His great work for humanity here has seemed to 
us in its fidelity and completeness to have been 
done as that of one realizing the sacred obligation 
which the possession of great talents implies, and 
“ As ever in the great task-master’s eye.” 
In the Association of Superintendents he ranks 
in years and wisdom among the elders, but in 
progressive ideas, in lively interest, in all that 
makes for the welfare of the insane and in the 
generous rivalry that forgetting self seeks only 
the common good, we count him still a young 
man. 
w. w. o.