Richard Sprigg Steuart

Richard Sprigg Steuart
Photograph of Richard Sprigg Steuart
Born	November 1797 Baltimore, Maryland
Died	July 14, 1876 Dodon, Anne Arundel County, Maryland
Education	St Mary's College, Baltimore
Known for	Spring Grove Hospital Center
Spouse(s)	Maria Louisade Bernabeu (m. 1824; d. 1883)
Relatives	George H. Steuart (politician), grandfather George H. Steuart (militia general) brother George H. Steuart (brigadier general) nephew.
Medical career
Profession	Physician
Specialism	Mental Illness

Richard Sprigg Steuart (1797–1876) was a Maryland physician and an early pioneer of the treatment of mental illness. He was instrumental in the expansion and modernisation of The Maryland Hospital for the Insane, now known as the Spring Grove Hospital Center, which became his life's work. Spring Grove continues to treat mental illness today, and is the second oldest institution of its kind in the United States. Steuart was relieved of his position as superintendent of the hospital at the start of the American Civil War, because he refused to sign an oath of loyalty to the Union, but he was reinstated at the war's end, and remained superintendent almost until his death in 1876.

Steuart was born in Baltimore in November 1797, younger son of the physician Dr James Steuart and his wife Rebecca. He was the fourth of eight siblings, of whom two died in infancy, of scarlet fever. He was raised at the family mansion at Maryland Square and educated at St Mary's College, Baltimore.

During the War of 1812, at the age of seventeen, Steuart volunteered his assistance as aide-de-camp to the Washington Blues, a company of militia raised and commanded by his older brother, Captain (later Major General) George H. Steuart (1790–1867), and served at the Battle of North Point on September 12, 1814, where the Maryland Militia were able to hold off a British attack long enough to shore up the defence of Baltimore. As he later recalled in his memoirs:

After the war, Steuart began the study of law under Brigadier General William H. Winder, who had commanded the United States forces at the Battle of Bladensberg and was court-martialled afterwards. However, Steuart abandoned law in favor of medicine, which he studied under Dr William Donaldson in 1818 at Maryland Medical University. He graduated with his M.D. in 1822, publishing in the same year a work On the Action of Arteries. After graduation he went into partnership with Donaldson at his general medical practice in Baltimore for seventeen years and, after Donaldson's death, succeeded to the practice. Early on however he began to specialize in the relatively neglected field of mental illness, and in 1834 he became President of the Board of Visitors of the Maryland Hospital for the Insane.