A central strand of the moral treatment practiced for twenty years at Athens, as well as in asylums across the United States, is therapeutic place, or the healing properties of a landscape, whether a natural geography or one intentionally shaped.3 The landscape designer for the Athens asylum, gardener Herman Haerlin of Cincinnati, worked in the nineteenth-century tradition of landscaping pioneered in America by Frederick Law Olmsted: creating a natural wildness that would calm the mind and soothe the soul.4 The idea of therapeutic, or restorative, landscape has been around for millennia, from at least the time of Asclepius and the Asclepian healing temples built in ancient Greece high above the sea on cliffs and bluffs affording beautiful views.5 Known also as restorative gardens, therapeutic landscapes have reemerged from time to time, notably in medieval monastic gardens such as that of Bernard of Clairvaux at the hospice of his French monastery.6 Today in the twenty-first century, the strand has emerged again, flourishing this time along with treatment modalities grounded in nineteenth-century moral treatment and reconceived with new names and disciplines such as wilderness therapy, milieu therapy, creative arts therapies, humanistic psychology, and restorative gardening.7
If you take a walk on the dirt roads and paths through the old fields around the Athens Lunatic Asylum buildings today, you will see great drifts of milkweed, Asclepius syriaca, a symbolic reminder of the roots of the moral treatment experiment at the Athens Lunatic Asylum. In early summer these tall plants nod with round magenta flower heads, which in August swell into pale green pods that by winter have dried and burst, releasing thousands of seeds that float on silky white threads. They evoke Asclepius, the healer of ancient Greece, who was taking up his work about the time that the Adena were using the grounds of the site of the Athens asylum for sacred purposes.
The research for this book was approved by the Ohio Department of Mental Health, which provided me with access to a wealth of nineteenth-century medical records, including patient commitment documents, the original 1874 medical logs, and files of the writings of patients and their families. I have had the privilege of reading thousands of patient case files and present here those illustrating the conditions and themes underlying the commitment of individuals to the asylum at Athens between 1874 and 1893. Although ultimately doomed by overcrowding and overshadowed by the rise of new models of care, for twenty years the therapeutic community at Athens pursued moral treatment therapy with energy and optimism.
The asylum has been known by eleven different names since it opened in 1874:
TABLE P.1
Names for the institution since its founding
Athens Lunatic Asylum, the name under which it opened, is the one used throughout this work. In 1993, the asylum closed and moved to a new and much smaller building directly across the river on its northern banks.8 The chapters of this book illustrate the moral treatment era (1874–93) at the Athens Lunatic Asylum through stories of tragedy, politics, confusion, struggle, and hope. Drawing upon case histories, medical notes, commitment documents, letters, and reports, each chapter illustrates a facet of the moral treatment experiment at the Athens Lunatic Asylum, including its patients, architecture, politics, therapeutic landscape, and caregivers.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is the first book published on the history of the Athens Lunatic Asylum. Until now, people seeking to learn about the asylum had to search in a variety of works scattered in many places. The general difficulty of gaining a coherent picture of especially the early history has contributed to all kinds of conjecture and supposition, which have served to continue the stigma still associated with mental illness that lingers about the asylum. I hope that this work, by presenting facts and stories of actual events and people, will help dispel rumors and speculation. I have spent eleven years—much longer than I originally thought—researching the asylum, and my work was made possible by the support of many people and organizations.
Particular thanks go to staff of the Ohio University Libraries and its Robert E. and Jean R. Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections: Doug McCabe, Bill Kimok, Janet Carleton, Judy Connick, and George Bain worked for over a decade with patience, expertise, and enthusiasm to support my work. Janet along with Kelly Broughton made it possible for me to tell the story of the asylum with historical photographs. Others who provided help with the many images are the Athens County Historical Society and Museum, the State Library of Ohio, the Chicago Public Library, the Cosmos Club, the National Archives, and the Athens Messenger. The Ohio Historical Society in Columbus, custodian of the original 1874 asylum casebooks, helped provide a unique window into life in the moral treatment years of the asylum. George Eberts, a former employee of the asylum, was an early supporter of my research; Dave Malawista, Sue Foster, and Pam Callahan were also kind enough to share their experience with me.
Much of the material presented here is drawn from patient records, access to which remains restricted because of the patient names associated with the records kept by the asylum. The Ohio Department of Mental Health approved my research (twice—once as doctoral research and again for the book) as one of their projects and provided access to the restricted patient records held by the Mahn Center and the Ohio Historical Society.
Ohio University’s Patton College of Education supported my dissertation, out of which grew this book, with a research grant. The Patton College of Education also awarded me a scholarship from the HVFH/Pi Beta Phi Endowment Fund for Graduate Student Support, which gave me time to complete my initial research. I am grateful also to Janice Phelps Williams for her advice and encouragement.
Thanks go to Ohio University Press and to Gillian Berchowitz for making this book a reality. Thanks also to the Athens-Hocking-Vinton 317 Board and the Athens County Convention and Visitors Bureau for their generous support for the production of the book. I also acknowledge the patients, caregivers, families, farmers, builders, craftsmen, communities, elected officials, and administrators who figured in the history of the asylum. I hope I have done them justice.
ONE
THE MORAL TREATMENT EXPERIMENT
“A Magnificent Site Overlooking the Hocking Valley”
On a spring day in 1865, Dr. William Parker Johnson returned home to Athens, Ohio, from the Civil War. He had been mustered out from Camp Dennison in Columbus, Ohio. Three weeks earlier, General Robert E. Lee had surrendered the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia to Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant. Dr. Johnson, known to friends and family as Park, was a country doctor. He had enlisted in the Eighteenth Ohio Volunteer Infantry as a physician and finished his war career as head of two post hospitals in Tennessee, where he found a calling as an organizer and administrator. He returned to Athens transformed from country doctor to experienced hospital administrator by his work caring for the ill and wounded of the Kentucky and Tennessee battlefields.
Politics
Men who survived the Civil War returned home to resume their lives; some were shattered in body or mind and others had gained new leadership skills and recognition for heroic achievements. The political