Asylum on the Hill. Katherine Ziff

at the asylum for a month, after which he was sent home “seemingly almost well.” Presumably the asylum’s regimen of rest and purposeful activity was more curative than the home treatment he received: “blistering the nape of the neck.”¹⁸ A fifty-year-old farmer from the Ohio River town of Portsmouth was committed by his wife in 1874 because he had attempted suicide by shooting himself. This man had been hospitalized twenty years earlier at the asylum in Columbus, Ohio, but was at home on his farm in 1874 when he attempted suicide.¹⁹ During the previous three weeks, he had “acted strangely, avoiding the society of friends and imagines there are men on the roof of his own house and sometimes that of his neighbors.” The medical witness and the asylum’s admission notes describe him as a man “with all sorts of delusions about his wife and children being in the fires at the boilerhouse” and who “sometimes imagines he is being robbed at night and goes about the house naked.” Hospitalized in February 1874, he arrived “at times very much depressed and thinks all his friends have deserted him.” Three months later he was “still very much discontented with being kept here,” and though his general health was good, he “did not eat much.” In July 1874, his condition was much the same. The casebook records that in July he “got outside one day and ran to the hill but did not attempt to go farther.” In September, he was taken home by his family.²⁰

      FIGURE 2.2 Letter and note from patient, 1880. Courtesy of the Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections, Ohio University Libraries.

      The new asylum provided a place for southern Ohio’s poorhouses (also known as county homes or infirmaries) to relocate their residents thought to be mentally ill.²¹ Among the first patients admitted to the asylum at Athens were four women from the Ross County Home: Female Patients 3, 4, 5, and 6. Their cases for insanity, brought before the probate court in Chillicothe on the afternoon of January 16, 1874, had been prepared that morning by the physician attending the county home. The court determined that the women were unable to attend the probate hearing in the judge’s chambers, and they were represented, with no other witnesses, by the physician attending the county home. At the proceedings, they were all found to be insane and eligible for commitment to a state asylum. Two days later, the four women, one of them in a straitjacket, traveled together to Athens (accompanied by the Ross County sheriff) and were admitted to the asylum on January 19. The reports of the medical witness and the asylum casebook provide a glimpse into the lives and conditions of these four women from the poorhouse.

      Female Patient 3, age thirty-two, was determined to have been mentally ill for five years. The physician serving as medical witness summarized the grim facts of her condition: “The cause of her illness is exposure after confinement (childbirth) with her last child, want, and a brutal husband. She appeared entirely recovered at the end of her first year (at the Infirmary) and was sent home but relapsed. Medical treatment has consisted of nourishing food and cold baths.”²²

      Female Patient 4, a forty-year-old widow, traveled to the asylum wearing “sleeves,” the Victorian name for a straitjacket. The physician determined that she had been insane for five years and wrote only of her history, “Cause unknown—was in Asylum at Columbus Ohio for three years past, then confined in the County Infirmary.” From the casebook we learn that she “was brought in sleeves by sheriff,” that she had been treated previously at the Central Asylum at Columbus for “paroxysms of excitement,” and that her health was “tolerable good” but her sight and hearing were failing. The casebook holds one note about her progress, written a few weeks later on February 2, 1874: “[She] remains much the same as when admitted—general health tolerable good, at times violent, destructive and dangerous.”

      The medical witness physician made one note in regard to Female Patient 5, who was thirty-eight: “I found her at the Infirmary five years ago, insane—she has failed in her speech and articulation, in the last six months very much. The cause is unknown except her father was a drunkard and abusive. There have been no attempts of violence.” An asylum physician noted a few weeks after her admission that she “remains the same as when admitted both physically and mentally. She is very noisy at times.”²³

      We learn from the Ross County certificate of insanity that Female Patient 6 was age fifty-nine and “she has been insane for over five years—was in Asylum at Columbus two years and the last time in the infirmary. Cause: unhappy family relations with her husband.” After she was admitted to the asylum at Athens, one case note was entered for her, on February 2, 1874: “Failing sight and deficient hearing. [She] has not improved since her admission into the Asylum. She is very excitable at times.”

      Difficulty following childbirth—exhaustion, depression, illness, lack of proper care—brought many women to the asylum. Ill with mastitis and depressed following the birth of her third child, the wife of a Civil War veteran was hospitalized in 1874 by her doctor and her husband, becoming Female Patient 36.²⁴ Her doctor wrote,

      Duration of her illness is about six months, the exciting cause of which is probably childbirth or the puerperal state.²⁵ [She] has attempted violence upon herself. She has taken remedies to quiet her nervous system, such as Chloral Bromides and Morphine, but not regularly nor in large enough doses to have much effect. . . . About three months after confinement and while suffering with repeated mammary abscesses & much pain & loss of sleep she first began to exhibit symptoms of Insanity[.] [S]he has been very melancholy—has several times attempted suicide & says she is fearful she may kill her child. Does not eat or sleep enough[;] requires constant watching.

      The casebook noted that she had been brought by her husband to the asylum suffering from an abscess of both breasts and talking of suicide by hanging, poison, or drowning. She recovered and returned home, and a few years later she visited Boston and wrote a memoir of her visit there to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s garden, where he presented her with a rose. The son whose birth precipitated her illness went on to work for the Internal Revenue Service and lived to the age of eighty-one.

      Another mother and her child did not fare so well. A probate judge in Zanesville, Ohio, added this note to the asylum superintendent to the standard commitment form for Female Patient 62, emphasizing the desperate situation of his charge, an unmarried woman who had killed her child:

      March 3, 1874

      Dr. R. Gundry:

      Athens, O.

      Dear Sir:

      In the case of ______, I copy the following from the Medical Certificate. The exciting cause of her Insanity “is trouble growing out of a bastard child. She murdered her child with an ax and does not attempt to conceal it. She has been worse during her menstrual period. She imagines spirits present and talking with her.”

      Any information that I can give you regarding any of the patients sent from here will be cheerfully given.

      Very Respectfully

      L. R. Landfear

      Probate Judge

      Commitment for insanity in circumstances of unwed motherhood was not unheard of. Female Patient 192, a twenty-eight-year-old woman from Zanesville, Ohio, was hospitalized ostensibly for guilt over having disgraced her family in this manner. Explained the medical witness,

      The exciting cause of disease: compunction for having disgraced herself and family. Has not attempted violence. Her mind was devoted as much as possible by all who knew her. Chloral & bromide & Potassia were given to procure sleep, other remidees we used as tonics etc. . . . I would say there are other circumstances which would have tendency to throw further light upon the subject. Last Spring she had an Illegitimate child, and from that time never left the house. During Aug. and Sept. she nursed a Sister who had Typhoid Fever and during that time the first symptoms of Insanity were detected.

      Women were also declared insane because of the strain of bearing many children. A twenty-six-year-old mother from the Columbus area was sent to the Athens asylum because of “over-anxiety about her children. The primary cause is over-child bearing, having had five children in six years.” Her doctor suggested that she might be soon