Asylums have always served community needs for social stability, and the Athens asylum was no different. Patients’ rights were nonexistent in the nineteenth century. An Ohio citizen could be involuntarily committed upon the recommendation of the county probate judge and the written word of a physician that the patient was insane. The judge forwarded his recommendation for commitment along with the medical certificate to the superintendent of the state asylum, who made the decision whether or not to hospitalize. Occasionally a probate judge attached with his legal forms a handwritten note asking for special consideration on behalf of family or community.
A judge from the Ohio River town of Belpre took the unusual step of including with commitment papers a two-page letter asking for help from the asylum superintendent dealing with a patient recently released from the asylum. Upon his release, this former patient did something to generate a warrant for his arrest, but the sheriff failed to arrest him before the warrant expired, and for this reason he could not be confined in jail, much to the annoyance of the community. “The Sheriff failed to arrest ______ within the life of the writ but then did so after which the Probate Judge was absent. . . . I do not know what the end of it will be. . . . [T]he people of Belpre are very much annoyed and if the reports I hear are true something must be done.”30
Some patients were hospitalized because they exhibited behavior considered bizarre or improper. An Athens family committed one of its daughters after fetching her home from a brothel in Cincinnati. Male Patient 318, a fifty-one-year-old tailor admitted in 1874, was committed for painting morbid pictures. The medical witness to the probate court noted, “The history of his case is as follows: A tailor by trade, he indulges in painting all kinds of objects representing his morbid imagination which are in contradiction with his intelligent countenance. Duration not known. Has never made attempts of violence upon himself nor upon others. He is peaceable.”31
Public officials in the coalfields of the Hocking River valley used the asylum at Athens on at least one occasion to try to prevent the spread of labor unions. In 1887, a coal miner became Male Patient 1945 in the Athens asylum because he was trying to organize a labor union.32 Wrote the committing physician, “His talk is constantly in regard to the Knights of Labor. He imagines it is his especial business to organize said society. Over-study about labor organizations is the cause of his insanity.”33 The man’s efforts to form a labor union were quickly extinguished by the local judge and a physician willing to attest to his insanity.
Hospitalization was also a solution for the community problem of what to do with homeless men, or “tramps.” Nineteenth-century homeless men were viewed as a threat to the social order because they did not work for a living. Robert Frost’s turn-of-the-century poem The Death of the Hired Man offers a gentle interpretation of homeless men who wander when the weather is fine and return to employers in the winter in need of shelter, who cannot be depended on to complete jobs and talk in jumbles.34 But the general opinion of tramps in the late nineteenth century was much harsher; they were considered a challenge to the Victorian social order propped up by ideals of work and family, of which the tramp had a commitment to neither. Governor Thomas Young referred in his annual message to the “formidable and dangerous element of society known as tramps.”35 The Athens Messenger reported in 1880 that Cincinnati police shot and killed a tramp when he resisted arrest for verbally insulting several ladies.36
The Athens asylum took in tramps. Male Patient 1675 was hospitalized in 1885. His age was unknown, though he was known to be a native of France. His occupation was listed as “tramp,” and the medical witness, Athens physician Dr. J. A. Frame, noted that he slept well, his bowels were regular and his appetite good, he was quiet, and he was neither violent nor destructive. Dr. Frame wrote that he “imagines he is very rich. And that he is thousands of years old.”37
FIGURE 1.8 Medical certificate presented to probate court for the purpose of committing Male Patient 1675. Courtesy of the Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections, Ohio University Libraries.
Another tramp, born in Germany, was one of the asylum’s earliest patients. Dr. B. Raymond wrote of the wretched condition in which Male Patient 319 was found: “The history of his case is as follows: He was found some years ago walking the road back and forward. People in the neighborhood became affright of him. He was taken up, found in a starving condition. He refuses to speak. He writes in German. The duration is unknown. The patient is free from infectious disease and vermin. He wallers in his excrements.”38
Although the Civil War produced presidents and community leaders, the massive trauma endured by the nation inevitably exhibited itself in the lives of the war’s survivors. The weaponry used in the Civil War introduced a new and higher level of lethality, with the rifled musket and minié ball expanding the killing range of the infantry soldier from fifty to a hundred yards to five hundred yards. Disease claimed twice as many as those who died in combat.39 The result was a war with massive casualties: 620,000 soldiers and 50,000 civilians. Post-traumatic stress disorder, known from World War I forward as combat fatigue, battle shock, or combat stress reaction, was not diagnosed or defined during the Civil War, but its soldiers could not avoid the effects of war.40 Civil War physicians referred to stragglers, soldiers afflicted with nostalgia, and soldier’s heart. Stragglers were soldiers who sat trembling and clutching their weapons, staring into the distance, exhibiting a startle response at any loud sound, and incapable of engaging in battle. At Antietam, for instance, a third of the Confederates were labeled “stragglers.”41 Nostalgia, a term devised by a seventeenth-century Swiss physician, was characterized by homesickness and defiant aggression, which generally disappeared as soldiers began to prepare for battle, thus triggering the production of adrenaline and other stress hormones in their bodies. Soldier’s heart was a cardiac disorder featuring very high heart rates, palpitations, and inability to perform physical work. The asylum at Athens admitted Civil War veterans who suffered from the war’s emotional and physical trauma. Some mothers and fathers of men killed in the war were committed because of the trauma of their loss.
Finally, Ohioans suffered during the six-year Long Depression. Triggered by the Panic of 1873, this period of economic decline wreaked havoc across the United States, bankrupting railroads, destroying businesses, and raising unemployment to 14 percent. In Ohio, Governor Edward Noyes devoted his inaugural address in 1873 to the economic disaster, outlining its effects on Ohioans:
A few months ago, that undefinable but tremendous power, called a money panic, imparted a violent shock to the whole industrial and property system of the country.
The well-considered plans and calculations of all men engaged in active business, or in the exertion of active labor, were suddenly and thoroughly deranged. In the universal business anarchy that ensued, the minds of men became more or less bewildered, so that few among them were able distinctly to see their way, or know what to do or what to omit, even through the brief futurity of a single week. All values and all incomes were instantly and deeply depressed. There was not a farmer, a manufacturer, a merchant, a mechanic, or a laborer, who did not feel that he was less able to meet his engagements or pay his taxes than he had been before. The distressful effect of this state of things was felt by all, but it was more grievously felt by the great body of the laboring people, because it touched them at the vital point of subsistence.42
As a result of this economic disaster, when the asylum at Athens opened in 1874 many of its first patients were men and women depressed and suicidal about business failure and highly anxious with fears of poverty and want.
The work to create the Athens Lunatic Asylum began three years after the end of the Civil War, and hopes were high for this new institution. Its relatively small size, compared to its contemporary asylums in America and Europe, was considered a favorable point. “Large as it really is,” wrote Dr. Richard Gundry (superintendent of the Southern Asylum at Cincinnati) of its room for 570 patients, “it is eclipsed by several in extent and capacity. In New York, the asylum at Utica, with its 800 patients; the New York city asylum, with its 1400 patients;