Allentown State Hospital: Firsts in American Psychiatric Care
Near Allentown, Pennsylvania
Allentown State Hospital occupies a remarkable place in the history of American psychiatry, accumulating firsts across a century of operation. It was Pennsylvania's first state hospital to treat mental illness through homeopathy. Doctor Solomon Fuller, one of the first Black psychiatrists in the United States, is linked by local historians to research here, a mind that had worked under Alois Alzheimer in Munich.
In nineteen thirty, the hospital opened a Children's Institute under Doctor Henry Klopp, one of the earliest dedicated child psychiatric facilities in the country. And in nineteen ninety-eight, Allentown State Hospital became the first psychiatric hospital in the nation to be completely seclusion free.
