Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
So, I hear we have an election coming up,
and I'm here to talk to you about insane asylums today.
(Laughter)
So, let's start it off with a little straw poll.
Who thinks that if you lived in the 19th century,
an insane asylum would be a pretty nice place to be?
You can raise your hands, you can clap.
Not a lot of input there.
Who thinks it would be a pretty dreadful place to be?
(Clapping)
It's kind of the response I expected;
that's what I'm here to talk to you about today.
There's a lot of stigma attached to insane asylums,
and most of it in America comes from recent insane asylums,
as typified by the American media
with such things as "American Horror Story Asylum,"
Sam Fuller's "Shock Corridor" and "The Snake Pit."
It doesn't just extend to America, of course.
Stigma goes back as far as the Royal Bethlehem Hospital,
also known as "Bedlam."
But what we have to keep in mind when we discuss the insane asylum
is that in America
insane asylums existed for a very specific period of time,
approximately 1797 to 1900.
After that, we had state hospitals, psychiatric centers
and institutions such as that.
I'm going to get to all that
and tell you why we shouldn't feel so much stigma toward the insane asylum.
But first, I'm going to jump back into my own history, for a moment.
I began exploring abandoned buildings
with the Gorsline Building, overlooking High Falls.
Some of you Rochesterians might remember it,
because it was there for over 100 years;
sadly, it is no more.
But some of my older friends had driver's licenses and some cannabis
and thought it would be a lot of fun to get up on the roof
and smoke that cannabis.
Well, I wasn't so enthusiastic about that bit,
but I did wander around for two hours taking a look at the machinery,
and the first of many of my misconceptions about abandoned structures came to me,
which was, "These places aren't ugly.
They're not full of scary hobos with needles and axes.
They're actually just quite beautiful places
with rusting machinery and great history to them.
My first insane asylum came four years later.
It was Danvers State Hospital in Massachusetts.
I went with some school friends just to wander around and check it out.
And again, I had misconceptions.
I thought there were going to be shackles on the walls;
I thought there would be electroconvulsive therapy equipment,
lobotomy stuff
and, you know, all that stuff you see in American media.
Because since the 1930s with the publication of "The Snake Pit,"
that's really the only picture we've seen.
Sadly, this beautiful building in High Victorian Gothic style,
went down in 2006.
And that is the leitmotif of these places:
they're being demolished at an incredibly rapid rate.
One that isn't, however -
and my favorite of these buildings -
I discovered four years later in Buffalo, New York,
right down the road.
Buffalo State Hospital is a linear plan building
that I also had a misconception about,
which is that I could never get into it,
because it was as impenetrable as Fort Knox.
Yeah, of course, less than a week later,
I was finding my way traveling across collapsing floors in the brick wards,
through the burned-out sections of the sandstone wards,
and to the great spiral staircase that led up into one of the towers,
and then to an 80 foot rickety ladder - that I probably shouldn't have trusted -
so I could get out under the roof in between the towers.
And what did I find there?
The most beautiful, peaceful, wonderful feeling
as I wandered these corridors through the day,
stood on this rooftop,
and I realized the myth of the insane asylum is just that:
a myth.
However, there is some truth to the fact that psychiatry did some terrible things.
Here's the important point:
Psychiatry as a discipline didn't really exist during the asylum era.
Thomas Story Kirkbride, who we'll talk about later,
founded the precursor to the APA,
but really all an asylum could do is do what its name said: be a haven.
And that's what Buffalo was.
So what came after the asylum era?
Some pretty nasty stuff.
Joseph S. DeJarnette was a huge proponent of eugenics in America.
He was responsible, partially,
for the Buck versus Bell decision, in 1927,
that allowed American asylums,
or at least those in Virginia at the time,
to involuntary sterilize anybody who was a misfit,
a deformative
and some other words that I dare not repeat on stage.
Pretty nasty fellow.
And his ideas, sadly, became wildly popular in America.
In fact, we were forcibly sterilizing people in psychiatric hospitals
until 1979.
But his ideas weren't just popular in America;
they actually were widely talked about in Germany
and were later used as a reference point during the Nuremberg Trials
because of Aktion T4,
which took it one step further:
euthanization instead of sterilization.
So should there be stigma there?
Perhaps, with this individual.
Henry Cotton, Superintendent of Trenton State Hospital.
Another guy with some loopy ideas;
[he] felt that sanity was rooted in infections of the teeth,
of the spleen, of the colon,
of the bowels.
So, one by one, he'd remove these organs from his patients.
After a certain number died on his operating table -
quite a high number, sadly -
he was, finally, quietly retired to a large suite on the hospital grounds.
And of course, the famous Walter Freeman,
inventor and main proponent of the transorbital lobotomy.
Feeling that the prefrontal lobotomy took too long
and not owning a surgical license, which is necessary to perform one,
he started jamming ice picks through people's eyes.
And, in fact, he toured the country in the "lobotomobile"
and performed over 3,400 of these,
eventually losing his medical license altogether.
But that's not the main story.
Sure, there were cold-water baths;
there were forcible shower rooms,
where patients were lashed up and a hose was turned on them;
and there were various shock therapies,
most notably electroconvulsive therapy.
But the main story is about the optimism of the asylum during the asylum period.
Now look at these three hallways here.
One thing you'll notice about them
is that each side of the hallway has a bank of doors leading into rooms,
and the other side has windows,
allowing tons of air and light into the building.
This means that the cost per patient room was twice as much
because single-loaded corridors are more expensive to construct.
But that was standard for a hospital of this type.
And this is, again, Buffalo State Hospital.
Here's one of these hallways, you know, a long time ago.
This is an undated photograph from the archives.
But the blueprint of the hospital shows a long, linear building
so that every room would have a good view,
get good light,
have beautiful grounds outside -
in this case,
the landscape architects were Olmsted and Vaux of New York,
famous for Central Park.
And unfortunately,
this particular building lost three wards in 1966,
when they were demolished
to build the very ugly Strozzi Building in their place.
So, who came up with this idea for a linear-plan building?
Well, it was a man named Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride,
who was, basically, a savant as a physician.
By the age of 30, he was running the Pennsylvania Institute,
which was the premiere hospital in the country for treating insanity.
His hospital was beautiful;
it worked on a linear plan,
and this gave him some ideas.
So eventually he published a very important book
which laid out both the ways to build and maintain an insane asylum
in the era when there was no psychiatry,
when there was no treatment.
And what he stressed was art, was air, was light,
was occupational therapy,
restive cures, a bucolic setting,
any number of things that we don't usually think of
when we think of the creepy, decaying place
with the prison doors and the manacles.
Because that's not what he prescribed.
And that is not the way
over 100 of these linear-plan buildings were built in America.
So, let's take a look at how these ideas were put into practice
at Buffalo State Hospital.
This a curved-connector corridor
which connected two of the ward pavilion buildings,
which were each free-standing buildings.
What was the purpose of this?
Well, simple: fire protection.
You put a fire door at either side -
a curved hallway will not allow patient beds
even when the hospital gets overcrowded -
in that way, patients could escape the wards
if any of the wards catch fire.
This was a great amount of foresight from the architect, H.H. Richardson,
and when a fire did in fact break out at Buffalo State Hospital,
no one was injured.
All of the patient areas, however, were light and airy,
as you can see in these three examples here:
of a dayroom and two dormitories.
The patients would be allowed ample light,
card tables, recreation,
other buildings they could visit for sport and so on.
Even the employee areas,
like all of these attic rooms, coat rooms -
even the light switches in the attic -
were beautifully designed.
So [when] we picture the asylum, we picture horror,
we picture a gothic horror,
but that is not really the story of the asylum.
And you can see in the photos of the chapel, the dining room
and the end of the ward with the stained-glass here
that that wasn't the true story.
Sadly, however, that's the narrative that got continued,
and that's the narrative that persists to this day.
And what that means is that the majority of these buildings are now gone.
So, I'm going to ask you a couple of things.
I'm going to ask you
to stop thinking of these places as places of dread and stigma.
Yes, there are photographs like this,
that demonstrate darkened corridors with wheelchairs,
but this was actually a trick of myself
with artificial lighting and a completely boarded-off hallway.
This was not the way the hallway looked when it was well lit.
The story of the stigma is false and ought to be dispelled.
So I'd ask you one final thing,
which is if you can't do that,
if you cannot look past the stigma of these buildings in America,
then at least preserve the ones that remain.
Even if you think of them as horrible.
After all, they were able to preserve
the ovens at Auschwitz, Birkenau, Dachau, Belsen.
Why can't we do that in America, even if these were bad places?
But my contention is that they were not.
Thank you.
(Applause)