9: A third theory for the origins of Geel's foster care system

My money is on this one

Feb 26, 2024

This is the ninth part of a series. You can find part one here.

I spent weeks going back and forth between thinking Geel’s family care system dated to the Gauls and the Merode family. I was exhausted trying to make sense of all the information.

When I finally pieced things together, I was surprised by how angry I felt. The family care system in Geel had been started by a saint. It just wasn’t any of the dozens of saints I’d been looking at.

The origins of Geel have not been lost to time

As much as Geel was the subject of much burning and pillaging and was tossed from one ruling family to another for hundreds of years, there is a wealth of records online. There are scattered church records from across the centuries, with all sorts of boring details about who was doing what, where the money was coming from, and where the money was going. If pilgrims were a great source of wealth, that money should be mentioned somewhere. As late as 1743, indulgences were granted for participation in the procession of Saint Dymphna, with no mention of pilgrims outside of this time or of boarders. And then…in 1802 there were 400 boarders.

Despite staying up late night after night reading archival documents, I had no idea how or when Geel’s adult foster care program got started. It appeared to have emerged overnight like a mushroom.

Which, of course, is the answer. The complete lack of any references to the foster care system prior to the 1800s was the information I was looking for. It was right there in the first sentence of Esquirol’s 1838 account of his visit to Geel:

“There has existed from time immemorial, in the center of Belgium, in the commune of Gheel, a colony of the insane which had not yet been visited by doctors, and on which no publication has been published.”

He was confident that nothing had been published about Geel because he knew the guy who created the colony and made up the story.

Andrew Halliday explains it all, sort of

I had been back from my visit to Geel for weeks by the time I encountered Sir Andrew Halliday’s 1828 account. Immediately after publication it was mocked in The Lancet in a review in which they insinuate that he’s an imbecile. His book was then more or less ignored.

Halliday provides us with a slightly different and far more plausible explanation for how Geel became internationally known for curing the insane.

“a certain English lady of high rank and surpassing beauty, when driven to madness by the treachery of a lover, and the cruelty of friends, wandered from her home and from her country, and found refuge in this deserted spot; where she recovered her reason, built a church, and devoted a long life to curing the insane, having received from heaven the power of performing such cures.”

The description of the shrine and ritual confirms that this is Saint Dymphna, even though he calls her Saint Dymph of Gheil.

Halliday recounts being told by the founder of the Antwerp asylum that prior to his involvement, Geel consisted of only a few houses in an uncultivated heath. The few villagers in those houses, due to “traditional superstition”, could cure lunatics. He took it upon himself to have cottages built “at public expense” and given to upstanding community members on the condition that they host boarders from the asylum at Antwerp. He’s inspired by how a Brussels asylum was able to ship all of its patients to Geel. He refers to the area as a “waste-land” where “the insane recovered rapidly.”

Unfortunately, Halliday can’t remember the name of the man1 who gave him this information and there is no year or even decade provided for when this happened. The general timeline matches up with the explosion of boarders in Geel that took place around 1800.

The curator of the Gasthuismuseum, Frieda van Ravensteyn, hints that it’s true that homes were built for host families:

“The hospice nurses also followed the example of the Geelse families and took care of mentally ill fellow human beings. They even expanded the guest house for these commensals or boarders, buildings that have now been repurposed as single-family homes: "The wealthy mentally ill, especially middle-class women from the entire Duchy of Brabant, in fact paid for the construction campaigns and poor relief."

Right away I suspected I knew who was behind this. A man who had the political power and the desire to begin pouring the incurables held in asylums around the region – that today includes Belgium, France, and the Netherlands – into Geel.

The other saint behind Geel

The missing evidence all points to Pierre-Joseph Triest. His name kept coming up and he seemed to be connected to everyone.

In 1760 Triest was born into the family of a successful blacksmith in Brussels, which was then part of the Austrian Netherlands. As a child he lived across the street from St Johns Hospital, which housed foundlings and the mad. He studied at the Jesuit College in Brussels, the Latin school at the College of Geel, the University of Leuven, and then the seminary in Mechelen. He and his brother were ordained as priests by (then archbishop) John Henry of Frankenberg in 1786. He spent a year in Mechelen, two years in Asse, and returned to Mechelen from 1791 to 1797.

During his first appointment in Mechelen he’s said to have found foster homes for three children. In Asse the parish priest, Father Ringler, became ill, so Triest’s responsibilities were expanded:

“his illness clearly affected both his mental and his physical capacities. He would display infantile and peculiar behaviour, and suffer from violent fits. The parish priest was 67 years old. He still lived at the presbytery, but was no longer capable of doing any work. The servants looked after him and guarded him because he had become difficult to master.”

In response, Triest “tried very hart to get Fr. Ringler into an old people’s home.” Lawyers were hired. Father Ringler died before the case made it before a judge.

In 1797, the year Napolean demanded priests swear an oath of loyalty to the state, Triest was officially elevated to the role of parish priest and appointed to Ronse. When the time came, Triest refused to take the oath of loyalty to France and went into hiding. This was the year his future partner, Jozef Guislain,2 was born to a wealthy family of architects.

Ronse houses the shrine of Saint Hermes, patron saint of the mentally ill and people with rabies. There is still an annual Fiertelommegang for Saint Hermes, with thousands of pilgrims participating in his saint’s day festival. The shrine has baths for the mentally ill. The tourism board describes the shrine, which has just been restored: “The most remarkable feature is the wooden plank with hooks. You can see it if you stand with your back to the reliquary. People suffering from mental illness were attached to it overnight, after bathing in the crypt, in the presence of the reliquary of St Hermes.”

According to Wikipedia, there’s a saying about Ronse: “Saint Hermes cures the area's madmen but keeps the Ronse dwellers as they are.”

In 1800 he founded a “workhouse of charity” for orphans in Ronse in partnership with the postman. He remained involved after he left for Gent.

Triest and the men working with him were arrested in February 1801. It is unknown where Triest was or what he did from May 1801 into 1802.

Canon Peter Joseph Triest, via Wikimedia.

The start of the family care system at Geel

The book Peter Joseph Triest: On His Way to Sainthood notes:

“it is precisely the French Revolution which strongly marked Triest’s life and probably determined its direction…He had to go in hiding for five years and, in retrospect, this was probably the most fruitful period of his life…The village priest of the time before the French Revolution became the founder of religious congregations, the organizer of the poor relief and the director of hospitals.”

There is no record of boarders in Geel prior to 1800. Oliver Sacks wrote that there were 200 boarders in Geel in 1800, which went up to 400 in 1820 as a result of asylums sending their patients to Geel in order to cut costs.

Triest was born into a world that was changing rapidly. Thomas Malthus was gaining renown for his concerns about the post Columbian Exchange population explosion. While the theory has come to be known as Malthusianism, he has become the figurehead of a discussion of the origins of poverty that lasted decades.

Poverty rates were a major concern in the low countries. They were battered by war and unrest. The economy had been undergoing major transformations with industrialization and new agricultural techniques and was about to see major reworkings of the social hierarchy.

Leopold II had made the issue of poverty worse in 1774, by passing a law calling for institutionalization of all people deemed to be insane, not just those considered disruptive to the community.3 Local governments that were already struggling to provide poor relief were suddenly obligated to cover the cost of institutionalizing a class of people they had rarely gotten involved with previously. As borders shifted, additional laws were passed to require the mad be kept under institutional control, including one in 1790.

In 1796 the York Retreat opened in England. It was the first example of moral treatment in a custom-built environment. It was built for Quakers by William Tuke. This was the same year poor relief and care of the sick officially shifted from the responsibility of religious orders to the French state.

In 1797, Sint-Dimpnakerk was shut down and priests who refused to pledge their loyalty to the civil authorities were forced into hiding or exile. Geel’s gasthuis was officially taken over by the French government from the Augustinian nuns who’d run it since 1509, although in reality they were simply rehired as civilian staff. Geel’s Latin school shut down in mid-January 1798, with the 160 students leaving town and the four teachers going into hiding until 1802.

In 1799 the churches of Geel were auctioned off by the French civil authorities. In 1801 the Catholic church regained control of Geel, which was switched from one diocese to another.

Triest took the opportunity to carry out his vision. He could provide for the poor at no cost by using new agricultural methods to cultivate the “wastelands” of the campine using the labor of people who were currently a drain on the economy. He could take the ideas of the York Retreat and recreate it within an existing village. It would be less expensive to build and would provide greater freedom to patients. A colony is far more flexible than a traditional asylum, both in terms of the level of care provided and the number of patients held.4

A colony that would provide peasants with income would provide stability in a time of great uncertainty. The Campine was controlled by major religious landowners, like Tongerlo Abbey, which had just been outlawed by the French. The majority of peasants accessed land through customary tenure and use of the commons.

It’s unclear if Geel had a long history of boarding-out the mad, aside from how boarding-out was a widespread practice in the western world. It is clear that Geel had a history of wet nursing children and boarding students. A biography of Triest notes that none of his 300 classmates lived at the college. Rather, “The pupils were boarded with relatives, acquaintances, or in a house recommended by the headmaster.” When family care suddenly emerged, those 300 students, and the money they paid for boarding, had just been expelled from the city.

Triest’s influence grows

In 1803 Triest was transferred to a church in Lovendegem, north of Gent. Soon after arriving he founded the Sisters of Charity of Jesus and Mary, to serve the “poor and miserable people.” He recruited two of the six original women from families he knew in Ronse. That year a new law was passed, calling for all “maniacs” held in the Brussels asylum to be sent to Geel.

That same year, the government of Gent decided to establish a hospital for incurables in the former Terhagen Abbey. In 1805, after obtaining imperial authorization for the order, the Sisters of Charity of Jesus and Mary were selected to establish the hospital. The sisters supplemented their funding by taking in proveniers. During the next 40 years the order would grow from 6 to 328 sisters, with 18 nunneries established throughout Belgium. Sisters owned nothing of their own, followed an intense schedule, maintained silence, and contact with the outside world was strictly controlled. In addition to running the hospital, they provided home care and ran a pharmacy. Each year there was a ten-day retreat followed by the noventa.

It was the canons who were responsible for arranging boarding-out. Thus, as the newly named Canon of Saint Bavo, Triest was simply going above and beyond in his responsibilities by taking charge of boarding-out on a grand scale, rather than just within his catchment area.

In 1806, Triest went to Paris to meet with the papal legate (who also served as Archbishop of Milan) and Minister of Religious Affairs. In 1807, Bishop Etienne Fallot de Beaumont placed Triest in charge of all of Gent’s social housing, poor relief, care for the elderly and mentally ill, beguinages, and workhouses. He quickly arranged to have his Sisters of Charity begin taking over the institutions he now oversaw. He would continue in this role for the remainder of his life.

He also founded his second order, the Brothers of Charity of Gent, in 1807. One of their early projects was converting the dungeon in Deuivelsteen into a modern mental hospital.5 The order would come to run ten institutions with 5,000 patients.6

While Triest had oversight of all institutions in the region of Gent and had connections throughout the low counties and France, he did not have control of all institutions nationally. He grew the number of patients boarded-out in Geel by undercutting the competition. This practice continued after Belgium became a separate country, leading the Netherlands, France, and Germany to continue sending boarders to Geel. Triest’s connections, regionally and in Geel, meant there was no need for him to work with the nuns running the gasthuis in Geel.

In 1811 the Prefecture of Antwerp established regulations for Geel, stating “Whereas from time immemorial, individuals suffering from dementia have been received in Gheel, both in the hospices and in private homes of this city.” He assigns oversight to Geel by a doctor, the police, and a senior member of the administrative commission of the hospices. Soon after, Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol, a student of Philippe Pinel, visited Geel. He goes on, over a decade later, to write the first detailed account of the family care system based on this visit. He recounts being shown around by Jules Parigot, who oversaw Geel as of 1811 and officially became the first medical director at Geel after the creation of Belgium.7

This same year, the French Minister of Justice passed legislation abolishing foster care in Geel. Nothing seems to have come of this, perhaps because in 1815 Geel ceased to be part of France and instead became part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. King William I supported Triest’s projects.

In 1816, Triest traveled to Rome and received papal approval for his work, including the potential to expand internationally. In 1818 he was invited to have the Brothers and Sisters of Charity create hospitals for incurables in Tournai and the insane asylum in Froidmont, outside of Tournai.

In 1822, Triest opened a school for deaf-mute boys and young men in Gent, based on methods used at Institut National de Jeunes Sourds de Paris in Paris. He founded gender-segregated schools for the deaf in Brussels in 1835. There was also a sheltered workshop to house deaf adults who could not live independently. The labor of residents went towards their room and board.

Jozef Guislain was among the first to become a doctor at the medical school in Gent in 1819. In 1824 he entered a design competition for an asylum commissioned by the Royal Society of Fine Arts in Brussels, which he won. This was the start of a professional partnership with Triest that continued until his death.

Triest founded his third order, the Brothers of Saint John of God, in 1825 to provide home care.

In 1828, Triest appointed Guislain chief physician of the mental hospital at Zandpoort in Gent, making it the first in the country to have a doctor on staff. Guislain visited all of the institutions run by Triest’s orders and consulted on them. Triest and Guislain began writing regulations for insane asylums together the next year. Guislain and Triest petitioned to have the asylum in Gent moved from the Duivelsteen castle to the old Alexian monastery by arguing that the mad in the Netherlands were treated worse than those in France, Germany, and England. This eventually led to the establishment of a new Gent asylum, named after Guislain.

When Belgium was founded in 1830, Triest’s power increased. Previously, Triest struggled to get approval to expand his order, thus limiting his staff. Now, he was no longer restricted and his funding was increased. King Leopold I elevated his projects to royal institutes.

Starting in 1831, Guislain worked with Edouard Ducpetiaux,8 general inspector of prisons and welfare institutions, to reform asylums nationwide. Ducpetiaux was a believer in Saint-Simonianism, which aimed to protect the industrial class by addressing the threats posed by the idling class. Together, these two men would present their plan to the king after Triest’s death.

Triest’s fourth order, the Sisters of the Childhood of Jesus, was founded in 1835 to care for orphans and abandoned children. In 1835 Guislain became a professor at Gent University, teaching the history of medicine and hygiene.

Triest had taken over the Merode family’s role in crafting the legend. Triest marketed himself as a man traveling around Belgium breaking the shackles of the insane, founding orders of monks and nuns to provide them with compassionate care. He branded himself as the Saint Vincent de Paul of Belgium. Dymphna was no longer an exorcist, she was the inspiration for an ancient system of adult foster care. Dymphna’s legend grew along with the development of Belgium’s national identity. Guislain carried on Triest’s work.

No saints, no charity

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