Saint Elizabeths Is a Hospital Reborn By Douglas Gordon, Hon.
AIA Sited on a bluff overlooking the confluence of the Potomac
and Anacostia rivers, the 336-acre Saint Elizabeths compound
accommodated the first large-scale federal psychiatric hospital
in the U.S. from 1855 until the federal government transferred
the hospital to the District of Columbia in 1987. Healthcare
innovator Dorothea Dix originated the idea of the hospital,
which, she wrote in 1852, was to provide the “most humane care
and enlightened curative treatment of the insane of the Army,
Navy, and District of Columbia.” The originally named Government
Hospital for the Insane became better known during the Civil War
by the moniker ascribed to the colonial tract—Saint Elizabeth’s
(although the apostrophe was inadvertently dropped when Congress
officially changed the name in 1916). Wounded and sick soldiers
and sailors at the time were averse to mentioning in letters
home that they were housed in an insane asylum. There are still
two cemeteries on