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A study has been made of what happened to two hundred and fifty-one consecutive women patients in the five years following their admission to the department for mental and nervous diseases of the Pennsylvania Hospital. We have records of isolated cases that have been followed for a life-time, but they lack the authority that comes from unselected consecutive cases. The fact that this as a private hospital has insisted on having responsible families and friends stand behind its patients has made possible this laborious undertaking.
The charts and tables show the condition of each of the 251 patients through five years. In the charts an individual can be followed by reading down a numbered column; psychosis unimproved is shown by close hatched lines, improved (usually fully able to look after herself at home) by lines more widely spaced, and recovery is shown by white spaces closed in at the bottom