Gheel

Gheel, a town in the province of Antwerp, 25 miles E. of Antwerp, in the Campine, and on the Herenthals and Moll railway. Its industries are unimportant, but the place is well-known, since for a long time past the neighbourhood has been the lunatic asylum or rather colony of Belgium. Tradition says that an Irish saint, Dymphna, took refuge here, and that at her church miracles of cure were wrought upon lunatics. Owing to the presence of so many pilgrims of unsound mind resorting hither, the inhabitants acquired a kind of hereditary faculty of dealing with such sufferers; and this fitness was officially recognised by Napoleon's prefect, M. Pontecoulant. In 1857 legislation, since supplemented, put matters on a definite footing. Some of the worst cases are, of course, confined and kept under constant medical supervision, but milder cases are distributed among the neighbouring villages, whose inhabitants take the lunatics as boarders, allowing them to share the labours, recreations;-and other incidents of family life.