Day 180/365 Bedlam

I'm still fascinated by my great great grandmother's sojourn in an insane asylum(her story:Day 174/365 Health Care, 1887 Style ) and have been spending a bit of time researching turn-of-the-last century insane asylums.

There's enough there to write a hundred blogs for a hundred years, but a few tidbits jump out.

This is Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride (isn't there a remarkable resemblance to Bob Newhart?). Instead of locking up the insane in prisons and poorhouses, his approach was based on what he called Moral Treatment. The idea was that isolation from cities, in a relaxing atmosphere, with good basic food and fresh air, would cure the insane.

To accomodate this method, he designed a "bat wing" building design, with the thought that the breezes would be able to flow through each building unobstructed. Male patients were housed in one wing, and women in the other while the most violent patients were housed on the ground floor, in the outermost buildings, farthest from the administration offices in the center building.

Maybe they didn't believe their own press about curing the insane.

I found the following list of reasons a person (and a LOT of women) could be committed to an insane asylum. It's long. On account of there were SO many ways to be insane back then.

Read this list carefully, and see how many justifications there were for locking your wife away.

REASONS FOR ADMISSION
WEST VIRGINIA HOSPITAL FOR THE INSANE (WESTON)
OCTOBER 22, 1864 to DECEMBER 12, 1889

(Different hospital than my gggrandmother was locked in, but exact same time period)

Amenorrhea
Asthma
Bad company
Bad habits & political excitement
Bad whiskey
Bite of a rattle snake
Bloody flux
Brain fever
Business nerves
Carbonic acid gas
Carbuncle
Cerebral softening
Cold
Congestion of brain
Constitutional
Crime
Death of sons in the war
Decoyed into the army
Deranged masturbation
Desertion by husband
Diptheria
Disappointed affection
Disappointed love
Disappointment
Dissipation of nerves
Dissolute habits
Dog bite
Domestic affliction
Domestic trouble
Doubts about mother's ancestors
Dropsy
Effusion on the brain
Egotism
Epileptic fits
Excessive sexual abuse
Excitement as officer
Explosion of shell nearby
Exposure & hereditary
Exposure & quackery
Exposure in army
Fall from horse
False confinement
Feebleness of intellect
Fell from horse
Female disease
Fever
Fever & loss of law suit
Fever & nerved
Fighting fire
Fits & desertion of husband
Gastritis
Gathering in the head
Greediness
Grief
Gunshot wound
Hard study
Hereditary predisposition
Ill treatment by husband
Imaginary female trouble
Immoral life
Imprisonment
Indigestion
Intemperance
Interferance
Jealousy
Jealousy & religion
Kick of horse
Kicked in the head by a horse
Laziness
Liver and social disease
Loss of arm
Marriage of son
Masturbation & syphillis
Masturbation for 30 years
Medicine to prevent conception
Menstrual deranged
Mental excitement
Milk fever
Moral sanity
Novel reading
Nymphomania
Opium habit
Over action on the mind
Over heat
Over study of religion
Over taxing mental powers.
Parents were cousins
Pecuniary losses: worms
Periodical fits
Political excitement
Politics
Puerperal
Religious enthusiasm
Religious excitement
Remorse
Rumor of husband's murder or desertion
Salvation army
Scarlatina
Seduction
Seduction & dissappointment
Self abuse
Severe labor
Sexual abuse and stimulants
Sexual derangement
Shooting of daughter
Smallpox
Snuff
Snuff eating for two years
Softening of the brain
Spinal irritation
Sun stroke
Sunstroke
Superstition
Supressed masturbation
Supression of menses
Tabacco & masturbation: hysteria
The war
Time of life
Trouble
Uterine derangement
Venerial excesses
Vicious vices in early life
Women
Women trouble
Young lady & fear


Sources: http://www.trans-alleghenylunaticasylum.com/main/history3.html

I'm thinking just being a woman in the late 1800s was enough to drive a person crazy, and if you weren't crazy when you went in, you went crazy shortly thereafter. Now to find out which floor/building great great grandma was in, cause the women in our family don't start out real patient as it is.