Christ's Hospital was not established as a foundling hospital but as an orphanage and school for "the fatherless children & other poor men's children that were not able to keep them..." It was not a warehouse for unwanted children, but a safe place where they received more than just physical care. The goal of Christ's Hospital was to return these children back to society as useful and productive members. It is a unique institution in that it also performed as an agent of general poor relief, giving money and pensions to elderly and sick adults, even if they were childless. It appears that Christ's, in concert with St.

On July 1, 1959, at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan, the social psychologist Milton Rokeach brought together three paranoid schizophrenics: Clyde Benson, an elderly farmer and alcoholic; Joseph Cassel, a failed writer who was institutionalized after increasingly violent behavior toward his family; and Leon Gabor, a college dropout and veteran of World War II. The men had one thing in common: each believed himself to be Jesus Christ. Their extraordinary meeting and the two years they spent in one another’s company serves as the basis for an investigation into the nature of human identity, belief, and delusion that is poignant, amusing, and at times disturbing. Displaying the sympathy and subtlety of a gifted novelist, Rokeach draws us into the lives of three troubled and profoundly different men who find themselves “confronted with the ultimate contradiction conceivable for human beings: more than one person claiming the same identity.”