50
ingly purchased, in 1840, a tract of about forty acres of land, comprising a portion of the hill called the Abendberg, in the Canton Bern, above Interlachen. The site of his Hospital buildings is about four thousand feet above the sea, and one or two hundred feet below the summit of the hill; it is well protected from the cold winds, and the soil is tolerably fertile.
There are few spots, even among the Alps, which can compare with the Abendberg in beauty and grandeur of scenery. Doctor Guggenbühl was led to select it as much for this reason as for its salubrity, in the belief, which his subsequent experience has fully justified, that the striking nobleness of the landscape would awaken, even in the torpid mind of the cretin, that sense of the beautiful in Nature which would materially aid in his intellectual culture.
On the southern slope of the Abendberg he erected his Hospital buildings, plain, wooden structures, without ornament, but comfortable, and well adapted to his purpose. Here he gathered about thirty cretin children, mostly under ten years of age, and began his work.
To understand fully what was to be accomplished, in order to transform the young cretin into an active, healthy child, it is necessary that we should glance at his physical and mental condition, when placed under treatment.
Cretinism seems to be a combination of two diseases, the one physical, the other mental. The physical disorder is akin to _Rachitis_, or rickets, while the mental is substantially idiocy. The osseous structure, deficient in the phosphate of lime, is unable to sustain the weight of the body, and the cretin is thus incapacitated for active motion; the muscles are soft and wasted; the skin dingy, cold, and unhealthy; the appetite voracious; spasmodic and convulsed action frequent; and the digestion imperfect and greatly disordered. The mind seems to exist only in a germinal state; observation, memory, thought, the power of combination, are all wanting. The external senses are so torpid, th