The success of the efforts of Seguin and Saegert was soon reported in other countries, and as early as 1846 excited the attention of philanthropists in England and the United States. Schools for the training of idiots were established, on a small scale at first, by some benevolent ladies, at Bath, Brighton, and Lancaster, England. In 1847, an effort was made to establish an institution in some degree commensurate with the wants of the unfortunate class for whom it was intended. In this movement, Dr. John Conolly, the father of the non-restraint system in the treatment of the insane, Rev. Dr. Andrew Reed, Rev. Edwin Sidney, and Sir S.M. Peto have distinguished themselves by their zeal and liberality. Extensive buildings were rented at Highgate, near London, and at Colchester, for the accommodation of idiotic pupils, while a strenuous and successful effort was made to obtain the necessary funds for the erection of an asylum of great size. The Royal Institution for Idiots, completed in 1856, has between four hundred and five hundred beds, and is already nearly or quite full. Essex Hall, at Colchester, has also been fitted up as a permanent establishment for their instruction, and furnishes accommodation for some two hundred more. Two small institutions, supported by private beneficence, have also been organized in Scotland.
The British institutions have admitted, to a very considerable extent, a class of pupils who are not properly idiots, but only persons of imbecile purpose, or simply awkward, and of partially developed intellects. Some of these, who have arrived even at the age of twenty-five or thirty years, have been greatly benefited, and, after two or three years' instruction, have left the institution with as much intelligence, apparently, as most of those in the same walk of life. This result is, and should be, a matter of great gratification to the managers; but it is hardly just to regard success in such cases as cures of idiocy. The greater part of the admissions to the Royal Institution are from the pauper and poor laboring classes; and the simple substitution of wholesome and sufficient food for a meagre and innutritious diet is alone sufficient to effect a marked change in them. The greater part of the pupils in that institution are instructed in some of the simpler mechanic arts, and the Reports assure us that they have generally acquired them with facility.