Green Care: A Conceptual Framework - Frisk i naturen

of St Dympna and stayed in a ‘therapeutic village’ where they were
sympathetically cared for by the residents (and pilgrims were regularly
weighed to demonstrate progress!) Bloor (1988) has described this as the
first example of a ‘Therapeutic Community’.
Oliver Sacks eloquently describes the history in his Foreword to Eugene
Roosens and Lieve Van de Walle’s anthropological illustration of Geel’s
current state:
“In the seventh century, the daughter of an Irish king fled
to Geel to avoid the incestuous embrace of her father, and
he, in a murderous rage, had her beheaded. Well before the
thirteenth century, she was worshipped as the patron saint
of the mad, and her shrine soon attracted mentally ill people
from all over Europe. Seven hundred years ago, the families
of this little Flemish town opened their homes and their hearts
to the mentally ill – and they have been doing so ever since.”
(Roosens and Van de Walle, 2007, p. 9)
This was a rural agricultural setting, and the main work activity for
everybody was to work on the land. A range of structures and procedures
were in place for taking care of these individuals in the context of local
families and wider village life. The tradition of caring in this way still
continues at the original town of Geel, 60km north-east of Brussels in
modern-day Belgium (see Roosens, 1979, 2008).
The literature contains a number of references to early observations
of the mental benefits of agriculture. For example, Benjamin Rush, an
American physician of the early nineteenth century, is often credited as
being the ‘father’ of modern therapeutic horticulture through his apparent
observations that working on the asylum farm was beneficial. The
following passage appears in many modern texts:
“It has been remarked, that the maniacs of the male sex in
all hospitals, who assist in cutting wood, making fires, and
digging in a garden, and the females who are employed in
washing, ironing, and scrubbing floors, often recover, while
persons, whose rank exempts them from performing such
services, languish away their lives within the walls of the
hospital.” (Rush, 1812, p. 226)
14 Green Care: A Conceptual Framework