Gheel

Gheel, a colony for the insane, in Belgium, 26 miles ESE. of Antwerp by rail. It is an oasis in a desert, a village and commune (20 miles in circumference) in a comparatively fertile spot, inhabited and cultivated by 11,000 peasants, in the midst of an extensive sandy waste, called the Campine (see BELGIUM). Here in 800 A.D. St Dymphna, an Irish princess, is said to have been beheaded by her father, for resistance to his incestuous passion. Pilgrims, the sick, the sorrowful, and the insane, visited the shrine of the Christian virgin; the last were restored to sanity and serenity. About 1300 insane persons are lodged with the citizens of this community, and are controlled and employed by them, and this without recourse to walls or other asylum appliances, and with little coercion of any kind. The quieter sufferers reside generally one in each family in the village, the more excited in separate farmhouses at some distance on the confines of the commune, while those requiring medical treatment are temporarily accommodated in the infirmary in Gheel. The support of the patients is in most cases guaranteed by the state. See works in French on Gheel and the 'Gheel system' by Duval (1867) and Peeters (1879).