Hannah Mills was a Quaker from Leeds

Leeds

Leeds is a city and metropolitan borough in West Yorkshire, England. In 2001 Leeds' main urban subdivision had a population of 443,247, while the entire city has a population of 798,800 , making it the 30th-most populous city in the European Union.Leeds is the cultural, financial and commercial...

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

, whose treatment and death in 1790 while confined in the York Asylum (now Bootham Park Hospital

Bootham Park Hospital

Bootham Park Hospital is a psychiatric hospital, part of NHS North Yorkshire and York. It is located in the Bootham district of York and is a Grade I listed building.-History:...

) is recognised as having led to the development of the York Retreat, which pioneered the moral treatment

Moral treatment

Moral treatment was an approach to mental disorder based on humane psychosocial care or moral discipline that emerged in the 18th century and came to the fore for much of the 19th century, deriving partly from psychiatry or psychology and partly from religious or moral concerns...

 of mental illness

Mental illness

A mental disorder or mental illness is a psychological or behavioral pattern generally associated with subjective distress or disability that occurs in an individual, and which is not a part of normal development or culture. Such a disorder may consist of a combination of affective, behavioural,...

 that became a model for progressive practices worldwide.

Hannah Mills was admitted as a young widow

Widow

A widow is a woman whose spouse has died, while a widower is a man whose spouse has died. The state of having lost one's spouse to death is termed widowhood or occasionally viduity. The adjective form is widowed...

 to the York Asylum on the 15th March 1790, suffering from 'melancholy' (what might now be termed clinical depression

Clinical depression

Major depressive disorder is a mental disorder characterized by an all-encompassing low mood accompanied by low self-esteem, and by loss of interest or pleasure in normally enjoyable activities...

). At the request of her relatives, local York Quakers tried to visit her but were refused permission on the grounds that she was in private treatment. Hannah Mills died there on the 29th April 1790. These events shocked the Quakers. Some visited the asylum and saw that patients were treated worse than animals. Their concerns and suspicions about conditions and treatments at the asylum, and the asylums of the time in general, were confirmed. William Tuke

William Tuke

William Tuke was an English businessman, philanthropist and Quaker. He was instrumental in the development of more humane methods in the custody and care of people with mental disorders, an approach that came to be known as moral treatment.-Career:Tuke was born in York to a leading Quaker family...

was enlisted to help develop a more humane alternative and the York Retreat was opened in 1796.