FIGURE 1.4 Front entrance to the administrative wing in the central part of the asylum. The photograph was taken before the portico was added in 1892. Courtesy of the Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections, Ohio University Libraries.
The movement for humanitarian care and public services blossomed in Ohio in the mid-nineteenth century, a response to the humanitarian impulse and the needs of a rapidly industrializing state. Across Ohio, public schools were established, libraries were begun, institutions were founded to serve orphans and persons with physical disabilities, and state hospitals were established for those with mental illness. Ohio built five Kirkbride hospitals in the nineteenth century, more than any other state except Massachusetts, which also had five. Ohio was the second state (after Massachusetts) to establish a Board of State Charities to provide oversight over Ohio’s state benevolent and correctional institutions. Charged with investigating and reporting on the condition of state benevolent and correctional institutions, the board, whose members served without compensation, was an advocate for persons with mental illness. The board routinely investigated complaints about asylums and documented conditions for the mentally ill who resided in jails or county infirmaries or, in some tragic cases, were kept naked in barnyards or locked in family basements. Governor Rutherford B. Hayes praised the board’s efforts, noting that “they have faithfully performed the thankless task of investigating and reporting the defects in the system . . . of our charitable and penal laws.”23
The Athens Lunatic Asylum was the last built of Ohio’s Kirkbride hospitals. Its architecture reflected its dedication to the national moral treatment experiment. Featuring a central section with a two long stepped-back wings, the asylum had three levels with a central administrative core of four levels, an attic, and a cellar. Male patients were housed in the east wing, women in the west wing. The central section housed offices and living quarters for professional staff, storerooms, visiting rooms for patients to receive visitors, a parlor, and a ballroom. The original structure (completed in 1874) contained 544 rooms. Patients were housed in 450 rooms; the asylum was designed to accommodate 252 patients in single bedrooms and an additional 290 in dormitory-style rooms. Food was transported from the kitchens along a small basement railroad and lifted upstairs by dumbwaiters to individual wards. The facility was heated by six coal-fired steam boilers in a separate rear building.24
FIGURE 1.5 Map of Athens, Ohio (1875), showing the location of the asylum southwest of the Hockhocking River. The asylum is labeled “S.E. Ohio Hospital for the Insane.” The South Bridge, northeast of the hospital, connected the village and the asylum. Originally published in D. J. Lake, Atlas of Athens County, Ohio. Courtesy of the Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections, Ohio University Libraries.
The site, which eventually encompassed over a thousand acres, began in 1867 with 150 acres on a bluff across the Hockhocking River from Athens. Eighteen and a half million bricks used for construction of the huge building were made by hand on the site using clay from the asylum’s grounds. Its hundreds of windows featured protective bars disguised as ornate wrought iron circles. The asylum was “situated upon a high plateau of land about a mile distant from the town of Athens, the river Hockhocking winding in its circuitous course through the valley between the asylum and town. The farm belonging to it comprises about one hundred and fifty acres, broken in its surface, somewhat wooded.”25
FIGURE 1.6 Map of Ohio University (1911) showing the South Bridge, northeast of the hospital, connecting the village of Athens and the asylum. In 1889, the asylum and the village collaborated to build Hospital Street (upper left) to provide paved access to the train depot. The road was built entirely by asylum employees and patients on right-of-way acquired by the village. Fred Lee Tom, topographic map of Ohio University and vicinity (hand-drawn map, 1911), used with permission courtesy of Fred C. Tom. Courtesy of the Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections, Ohio University Libraries.
Humanitarian Need and Social Control
On New Year’s Day in 1874, the asylum opened its doors to patients, six months later than had been planned. Built to care for 542 patients, within six years it housed 633 patients from twenty-nine counties in southeastern Ohio, as well as “overflow” patients from Columbus State Hospital, which was destroyed by fire in 1868. Rebuilt along the Kirkbride plan, the Columbus asylum reopened in 1877, relieving some of the crowding at Athens. From its beginning, though, the asylum at Athens was built to accommodate twice the number of patients recommended by Kirkbride: “Two hundred and fifty will be found about as many as the medical superintendent can visit properly every day, or nearly every day, in addition to the performance of his other duties.”26
Patients came from all walks of life. Most of the men were farmers from southeastern Ohio. There were also miners, machinists, railroad hands, school superintendents, schoolteachers, physicians, lawyers, engineers, students, clerks, merchants, saloonkeepers, hotelkeepers, glassblowers, carpenters, shoemakers, brewers, bakers, tailors, bookbinders, and printers. The occupations of female patients were not documented in the asylum’s annual reports—only women’s status as to whether they were married, widowed, or single. Each admission to the asylum was assigned a number; persons admitted more than once were given a new number each time they were admitted. The asylum used this numbering system until at least the 1950s.
Commitment documents and the asylum’s only surviving casebooks, large leather-bound volumes recording the admission and progress of patients admitted in 1874, reveal detailed stories. For some, the Athens Lunatic Asylum served a humanitarian function, providing respite for families desperate for help in caring for their mentally ill relatives and a safe haven for many patients. For others, the asylum was an agent of control, acting to preserve dominant economic interests and the moral sensibilities of a late Victorian-era community.
The asylum case records contain many examples of men and women in critical need of care. For example, Female Patient 454 was first hospitalized at age forty-eight, pregnant with her seventh child. “Whipped” by her husband and having just lost her sisters to consumption, she had her first “attack” of insanity. Four years later, at age fifty-two with seven children to care for, an abusive spouse to contend with, and in ill health, the asylum again provided respite care for her as Female Patient 1175.27
FIGURE 1.7 Medical certificate presented to probate court for the purpose of committing Female Patient 1175. Courtesy of the Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections, Ohio University Libraries.
Female Patient 1296, burdened with worries and delusions, was admitted in the summer of 1883 when she was thirty-four years old. She and her young daughter lived with her mother in a farming community. The committing physician wrote of her:
She has Insomnia and is unreasonable in conversation. [She has] ill feeling toward her mother and daughter whom she has always loved and cared for. She has constant fear of coming to poverty and dying in the poorhouse. She has had a great deal of trouble with business and domestic relations. Has paroxysms of scolding and using profane language. Very nervous, wakeful and anxious about business. General health is not good. . . . She has threatened to put her child out of the way and imagines her physician wants to marry her, if she was only rid of her little girl.28
Male Patient 35, a saddler from Columbus, Ohio, was despondent over having lost money through a business transaction and tried to hang himself several times. His wife, worried about his well-being and safety, took him before the county probate judge for commitment,