GHEEL, gal. A well-known Belgian colony for the insane, 26 miles east-southeast of Ant werp. It is a comparatively fertile spot, in habited and cultivated by 10,000 or 11,000 peas ants, in the midst of an extensive sandy waste, called the Campine. The farmhouses, though neat, and generally surrounded by trees and a garden, are evidently in the hands of the poor. They are sometimes built of brick; much more generally they are constructed of wattled or wicker work, thickly laid over with mud or plaster, and whitewashed. The dwellings are arranged into three classes, or cordons: those of the village proper; those scattered around in its immediate vicinity; and those collected into hamlets in the more distant and least re claimed portions of the commune, which is about 20 miles in circumference.
Historically, Ghee] is noticed as having been the spot where a woman of rank, said to have been of British origin, was murdered by her father, in consequence of her resistance to his incestuous passion. Pilgrims, the sick, the sor rowful, and the insane, visited the tomb of the Christian virgin; the last were restored to sanity and serenity. Dymphna became the tutelar saint of those stricken in spirit; a shrine rose in her honor, which now, for ten centuries, has been consecrated to the relief of mental disease, and has collected around it hundreds of lunatics, chiefly of the poorer classes. Formerly, besides the benefit derivable from proximity to the ashes of the saint, and from the prayers of the Church, the afflicted underwent a sort of novitiate in a building adjoining the church, where they were -chained to the wall, and subsequently passed under the mausoleum of their patron, etc.; but
now there do not appear to be any other than the ordinary ministrations of the Church to which the patients belong resorted to as treatment.
About 1300 insane persons are lodged with the citizens of this community, or with 1000 heads of families, and are controlled and em ployed by them. The quiet and industrious reside generally one in each family in the town, the more excited in the suburban cottages, and the most unmanageable with the laborers on the confines of the commune. In the enjoyment of comparative liberty, and of what is called the free-air treatment, these patients are, upon the whole, contented, tranquil, and healthy. Each individual is maintained for about eleven cents to fifteen cents per diem. Until recently, this colony was merely a psychological curiosity; re cently the anomaly and absurdity of treating all cases alike, and independently of medical aid, have led to the institution of a medical staff, the erection of a hospital, and the introduction, of many salutary alterations in the relations between the insane and their custodians, in clas sification and supervision. The compatibility of the seclusion of the insane with greater free dom, with domestic life, and association with the sane, have suggested the introduction of cottage asylums as a modification in the accom modation of this class in this country. Consult: Duval, Gheel (Paris, 1860) ; Brandes, Die Irren colonien (Hanover, 1865) ; Ruedy, Gheel (Bern, 1874) ; Pilgrim, "A Visit to Gheel," in American Journal of Insanity (Utica, N. Y., 1886).