"Traces the history of Missouri's first state mental institution, the Fulton State Hospital, founded in 1851. This institutional history examines a century and a half of changing attitudes toward mental illness, evolving treatments as medical and psychiatric science sought cures and the continuing administrative challenges of overcrowding and chronic underfunding"--Provided by publisher.
Deeds's subtle, meticulous, and wildly imaginative pencil and crayon drawings portray an unusual cast of characters: nineteenth-century dandies, Civil War soldiers, antique cars, fantastic boats and trains, country landscapes dotted with roaming animals, and fanciful architecture. None of these existed in the actual mid-twentieth-century landscape of Deeds's own life, but rather were representations of his inner world—an artist's poignant tribute to a faded past. Deeds lovingly bound his artwork in a cardboard and leather portfolio, a present for his mother. After being accidentally discarded in 1970, the album was rescued from the trash by a young boy and, thirty-six years later, came into the hands of artist and collector Harris Diamant, who provides the book's foreword. The Electric Pencil features all 283 of Deeds's arresting drawings—now avidly collected—done on ledger sheets from State Hospital No. 3 in Nevada, Missouri, and reproduced in the sequence of the original album. The Electric Pencil introduces readers to an astonishing record of one man's unwavering artistic vision in the face of the most inhospitable conditions.
While the St. Louis State Hospital dome has loomed over the St. Louis skyline for 150 years, the goings-on behind the closed doors of this mysterious complex of South City buildings has been the subject of speculation and curiosity for generations. This fascinating book takes readers beyond the gates on Arsenal and into an institution's unique history. It was through those gates in 1869 that 127 patients suffering from mental illnesses would pass to seek recovery through compassionate care. This richly illustrated volume presents their stories through a timeline of the hospital's history and gives an understanding of what life was like for these vulnerable, often poor and disenfranchised patients. Included are photos and anecdotes of weekly dances in the fifth-floor ballroom, card game parties, and long walks to newly opened Tower Grove Park. Straight from the carefully curated archives are the records of traditional lobotomies, experimental drug therapies, and electric shock"š€š"all prevalent treatments of their time. Author Amanda Hunyar takes readers behind the scenes and through the history of the iconic building with a complex tale to tell. Once the third largest hospital in St. Louis, and a place of healing and hope for thousands, its stories from generations past are finally ready to be shared. Even those with merely a passing understanding of its buildings can now come to appreciate its importance in the history of our region.
"This historical account of the care of insanity outside formal institutions explores key issues relating to the social history of madness from 1750 to the present day. These include women and the social construction of madness, the boarding out of lunatics by poor law authorities, familial care and treatment of the insane and the practice of 'mental healing' by general practitioners. Challenging conventional interpretations of the centrality of psychiatric institutions, the book is an important critical voice in the reappraisal of 'care in the community' and to the historical understanding of the role of medicine in the treatment of mental health problems."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Oral History is part of the Understanding Qualitative Research series, which is designed to provide researchers with authoritative guides to understanding, presenting, and critiquing analyses and associated inferences. There are three subareas in this series: Quantitative Research, Measurement, and Qualitative Research. This volume fits in the Qualitative Research group and addresses issues surrounding oral history - how to both fully and succinctly report and present this material, as well as the challenges of evaluating it.
This book examines alternative healing practices in American popular culture. From traditional folk approaches to more recent developments, it discusses the rise and fall of more than 100 popular approaches to addressing both physical ailments and mental health needs. Offering insightful accounts of everything from aging prevention to voodoo & Santería, Alternative Healing in American History: An Encyclopedia from Acupuncture to Yoga situates each popular approach in the history and culture of health and wellness in America. Moreover, the book shows that "orthodox" medicine and unconventional approaches may have more in common than many people think, because both are subject to the changing nature of the medical understanding and the strength of their appeal to consumers. While the main focus is on remedies lying outside the medical mainstream, the book also highlights how many widely accepted therapeutic treatments of the past—for example, "the water cure" (hydrotherapy) or lobotomy (psychosurgery)—fell out of favor and were quickly forgotten. Besides examining popular healing techniques, the book also explores the changing nature of the medical marketplace and how once-standard treatments (e.g., leeching, psychoanalysis) have had their ups and downs. The book comprises five chronological sections covering time periods from pre-1900 to the present.
Biomedicine in the Twentieth Century: Practices, Policies, and Politics is a testimony to the growing interest of scholars in the development of the biomedical sciences in the twentieth century and to the number of historians, social scientists and health policy analysts now working on the subject. The book is comprised of essays by noted historians and social scientists that offer insights on a range of subjects that should be a significant stimulus for further historical investigation. It details the NIH’s practices, policies and politics on a variety of fronts, including the development of the intramural program, the National Institute of Mental Health and mental health policy, the politics and funding of heart transplantation and the initial focus of the National Cancer Institute. Comparisons can be made with the development of other American and British institutions involved in medical research, such as the Rockefeller Institute and the Medical Research Council. Discussions of the larger scientific and social context of United States’ federal support for research, the role of lay institutions in federal funding of virus research, the consequences of technology transfer and patenting, the effects of vaccine and drug development and the environment of research discoveries all offer new insights and suggest questions for further exploration.
Begun as a pork-barrel project by the federal government in the early 1900s, the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians (also known as the Hiawatha Insane Asylum) quickly became a dumping ground for inconvenient Indians. The federal institution in Canton, South Dakota, deprived many Native patients of their freedom without genuine cause, often requiring only the signature of a reservation agent. Only nine Native patients in the asylum’s history were committed by court order. Without interpreters, mental evaluations, or therapeutic programs, few patients recovered. But who cared about Indians in South Dakota? After three decades of complacency, both the superintendent and the city of Canton were surprised to discover that someone did care, and that a bitter fight to shut the asylum down was about to begin. In this disturbing tale, Carla Joinson unravels the question of why this institution persisted for so many years. She also investigates the people who allowed Canton Asylum’s mismanagement to reach such staggering proportions and asks why its administrators and staff were so indifferent to the misery experienced by their patients. Vanished in Hiawatha is the harrowing tale of the mistreatment of Native American patients at a notorious asylum whose history helps us to understand the broader mistreatment of Native peoples under forced federal assimilation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Moral treatment, the vogue of early American psychology, freed the mentally ill of their chains. They were, however, still relegated to separate institutions, commonly called asylums, for at least a brief respite from the stressors that were thought to cause their madness. Did it work? Were the patients actually treated more humanely? The Untold History of the First Illinois State Hospital for the Insane tells the stories of the people who were subjected to this new treatment on the American Frontier. As author Dr. Joe Squillace shows, the institution first had great difficulty in getting established, but the town of Jacksonville, Illinois, where the Hospital was built, rallied to make it a more humane and person-centered institution. The Hospital's leaders, too, attempted, within the constraints of their time, to treat their patients with respect. But, at a time when mental illness was still not well understood some patients were tortured and imprisoned, even though they were not insane, even by 19th century standards. What is revealed in Untold History is an institution that struggled, much like today's institutions do, to address the needs of those living with mental illness, in a culture that did not understand it fully.Dr. Squillace traces the history of the institution from its origins in the 1840s to the 1930s, outlining the various treatments administered at the institution. The book demonstrates that the institution was deeply embedded in the larger community, rife with tangled and notorious Illinois politics. Sadly, many unknown and forgotten people were buried unceremoniously in potter's fields after dark. Macabre stories ensue. The Untold History of the First Illinois State Hospital for the Insane provides a tangible connection to a rural Illinois county's struggle with treating mental illness as the medical community's understanding of it developed throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.
