William Tuke

Did you know…..

William Tuke (1732-1822) was the founder of a psychiatric hospital called the “York Retreat“?

William’s great-grandson, psychiatrist Daniel Hack Tuke, described El Retiro as a refuge or oasis of tranquility in which the mentally ill were treated in a more humane way and could recover. The treatment carried out in that insane asylum was later called “the moral treatment of madness“.

William Tuke was a great philanthropist who dedicated part of his fortune and his time, until he was eighty-eight years old, to the management of the York Retreat. Tuke belonged to “The Society of Friends“, popularly known as the Quakers.

Tuke later influenced John Conolly, a pioneer in the treatment of non-restriction of the mentally ill. William Tuke was contemporary Philippe Pinel, French doctor who unchained the mad or alienated Bicêtre asylum in 1793.

(Edited by Dr. María Moya Guirao, MD)