[Applause]
so I here we have an election coming up
and i’m here to talk to you about insane
asylums today so start it off with a
little straw poll who thinks that if you
lived in the 19th century an insane
asylum would be a pretty nice place to
be can raise your hands you can clap not
not a lot of input there who thinks
should be a pretty dreadful place to be
it’s kind of the the response i expected
that’s what i’m here to talk to you
about today there’s a lot of stigma
attached to insane asylums and most of
it in America comes from recent insane
asylums as typifies by the American
media with such things as american
horror story asylum Sam fuller shock
corridor and the snake pit it doesn’t
just extend to America of course stigma
goes back as far as the Royal Bethlehem
hospital also known as bedlam but what
we have to keep in mind when we discuss
the insane asylum is that in America
insane asylums existed for a very
specific period of time approximately
1797 to 1900 after that we had state
hospitals psychiatric centers and
institutions such as that I’m going to
get all that and tell you why we
shouldn’t feel so much stigma towards
the insane asylum but first I’m going to
jump back into my own history for a
moment I began exploring abandoned
buildings with the Gores line building
overlooking High Falls some of you ROG
historians might remember it because it
was there for over a hundred years sadly
it is no more but some of my older
friends had driver’s licenses and some
cannabis and thought it would be a lot
of fun to get up on the roof and smoke
that cannabis well I wasn’t so
enthusiastic about that bit but I did
wander around for two hours taking a
look at the machinery and the first of
many of my misconceptions about
abandoned structures came to me which
was these places aren’t ugly they’re not
full of scary hobos with needles and
axes they’re actually just quite
beautiful places with rusting machinery
and great history to them my first
insane asylum came four years later it
was Danvers State Hospital in
massachusetts and i went with some
school friends just to wander around and
check it out and again I’d
misconceptions I thought there were
going to be shadows on the walls I
thought there was going to be
electroconvulsive therapy equipment
lobotomy stuff and you know all that
stuff you see in American media because
since the 1930s with the publication of
the snake pit that’s really the only
picture we’ve seen sadly this beautiful
building in high Victorian Gothic style
went down in 2006 and that is the late
motif with these places they’re being
demolished at an incredibly rapid rate
one it isn’t however and my favorite of
these buildings I discovered four years
later in buffalo new york right down the
road Buffalo State Hospital is a linear
plan building that I also had a
misconception about which is that I
could never ever get into it because it
wasn’t as impenetrable as Fort Knox yeah
of course less than a week later I was
finding my way traveling across
collapsing floors in the brick wards
through the burned-out sections of the
sandstone wards and to the great spiral
staircase that led up into one of the
towers and then to an 80-foot rickety
ladder that I probably shouldn’t have
trusted so I could get out under the
roof in between the towers and what did
I find there the most beautiful peaceful
wonderful feeling is I wandered these
corridors through the day stood on this
rooftop and I realized the myth of the
insane asylum is just that a myth
however there is some truth to the fact
that psychiatry did some terrible things
here’s the important point psychiatry is
a discipline didn’t really exist during
the asylum era Thomas story kirkbride
who will talk about later founded the
precursor to the APA but really Oh an
asylum could do is do what its name said
be a haven and that’s what Buffalo was
so what came after the asylum era some
pretty nasty stuff joseph STG Arnett was
a huge proponent of eugenics in America
he was responsible partially for the
buck versus Bell decision in 1927 that
allowed American asylums or at least
those in Virginia at the time to
involuntarily sterilized
anybody who was a misfit a de formative
and some other words that I dare not
repeat on stage pretty nasty fellow and
his ideas sadly became wildly popular in
America in fact we were we were forcibly
sterilizing people in psychiatric
hospitals until 1979 but the his ideas
weren’t just popular in America they
actually were widely talked about in
Germany and were later used as a
reference point during the Nuremberg
trials because of action t4 which took
it one step further euthanization
instead of sterilization so should there
be stigma there perhaps with this
individual Henry Cotton a superintendent
of Trenton state hospital another guy
with some loopy ideas felt that insanity
was rooted in infections of the teeth of
the spleen of the colon of the bowel so
one by one he’d removed these organs
from his patients after a certain number
died on his operating table quite a high
number sadly he was finally quietly
retired to a large sweet on the hospital
grounds and of course the famous Walter
Freeman inventor and main proponent of
the transorbital lobotomy feeling that
the prefrontal lobotomy took too long
and not owning a surgical license which
is necessary to perform one he started
jamming ice picks through people’s eyes
and in fact he toured the country in the
lobotomy Beale and performed over 3400
of these eventually losing his medical
license all together but that’s not the
main story sure there were cold water
baths there were forcible shower rooms
where patients were lashed up and and a
hose was turned on them and there was
various shock therapy’s most notably
electroconvulsive therapy but the main
story is about the optimism of the
asylum during the asylum period now look
at these three hallways here one thing
you’ll notice about them is that each
side of the hallway has a bank of doors
leading into rooms and the other side
has windows allowing tons of air and
light into the building this means that
the cost per patient room was twice as
much because single loaded
corridors are more expensive to
construct but that was standard for a
hospital of this type and this is again
Buffalo State Hospital here’s one of
these hallways you know a long time ago
this is an undated photograph from the
archives but the blueprint of the
hospital shows a long linear building so
that every room would have a good view
get good light have beautiful grounds
outside in this case the landscape
architects were Olmsted and Vaux of New
York famous for Central Park and
unfortunately this particular building
lost three wards in 1966 when they were
demolished to build the very ugly straw
Z building in their place so who came up
with this idea for a linear plan
building what was a man named dr. Thomas
story kirkbride who was basically a
savant as a physician by the age of 30
he was running the pennsylvania
institute which was the premier hospital
in the country for treating insanity his
hospital was beautiful it worked on a
linear plan and this gave him some ideas
so eventually published a very important
book which laid out both the ways to
build and the ways to maintain an insane
asylum in the era when there was no
psychiatry when there was no treatment
and what he stressed was was art was air
was light was occupational therapy rest
of cures a bucolic setting any number of
things that we don’t usually think of
when we think of you know the creepy
decaying place with the prison doors and
the manacles because that’s not what he
prescribed and that’s not the way over a
hundred of these linear plan buildings
were built in America so let’s take a
look at how these ideas were put into
practice at Buffalo State Hospital this
is a curved connector corridor which
connected two of the word pavilion
buildings which for each freestanding
buildings what was the purpose of this
well simple it was fire protection you
put a fire door at either side a curved
hallway will not allow patient beds even
when the hospital gets overcrowded and
that way patients can escape the wards
if any of the words catch fire
this was a great amount of foresight
from the architect HH richardson and
when a fire did in fact break out at
Buffalo State Hospital no one was
injured all of the patient areas however
were light in areas you can see in these
three examples here of a day room and
two dormitories the patients would be
allowed ample light card tables
recreation other buildings they could
visit for sport and so on even the
employee areas like all of these attic
rooms coat rooms even the light switches
in the Attic were beautifully designed
so we picture the asylum we picture
horror we picture a gothic horror but
that is not really the story of the
asylum and you can see in the photos of
the chapel the dining room and the end
of the ward with a stained glass here
that that wasn’t the true story sadly
however that’s the narrative that got
continued and that’s the narrative that
persists to this day and what that means
is that the majority of these buildings
are now gone so I’m going to ask you a
couple of things I’m going to ask you to
stop thinking of these places as places
of dread in stigma yes there are
photographs like this that demonstrate
darkened corridors with wheelchairs but
this was actually a trick of myself with
artificial lighting in a completely
boarded off hallway this was not the way
the hallway looked when it was well let
the story of the stigma is false and
ought to be dispelled so I’d ask you one
final thing which is if you can’t do
that if you cannot look past the stigma
of these buildings in America then at
least preserve the ones that remain even
if you think of them as horrible after
all we were they were able to preserve
the ovens at auschwitz birkenau Dachau
Belson why can’t we do that in America
even if these were bad places my
contention is that they were not thank
you [Applause]
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