River, was admitted to the asylum on Sunday, January 11, 1874. The case notes relate that he was sixty-two years old, married, Methodist, and possessed of a “good education.” His parents had immigrated to America from Ireland and died before his admission. In describing the patient’s disposition and health, the admitting asylum physician noted that he was a quick-tempered, kind, sober, and industrious man with light brown hair. Depressed and in poor health for three months, he feared financial ruin. He had good reason to be worried about his business: at that time, Americans were living through the Long Depression. We learn that the “exciting cause of his mental illness” was judged to be “business perplexity and general ill health” and that he was depressed “respecting his future condition and fear of pecuniary loss.” By the time of admission, he was weak in body with “paroxysmal attacks of jumping and noise,” had made an attempt to hang himself, and was thought to be dangerous and “apt to strike people suddenly.” He had lucid moments in which his mind functioned well, but at other times he was “sometimes excited and tries to fight and bite.” He slept poorly. We learn that his “vegetative functioning” was poor, he possessed a craving appetite, his bowels were constipated, his eyes were blue, his vision was good, and his hearing, smell, and taste were unremarkable. Six entries describing his condition appear in the casebook:
January 11: 98 1/2 temperature, pulse 64, weight 100 pounds. Strength 60 on the Dynamometer.14 Feeling almost normal. Seems to be much better and in good spirits.
January 20: temperature 98 1/4, pulse 64, weight 102 pounds. Seems to be some better. Had a bad day on the 18th, confined mostly to the forenoon and was about as bad as when brought here.
February 7: Pulse 60, strength 70, weight 104 pounds. Improving slowly. Does not have those spells of mania as when he came except some and then not so bad.
May 2: About the same as when first admitted mentally but much stronger physically. Tried to but [sic] his head against the wall about a week ago.
May 8: Has become jaundiced in the conjunctival some and in the skin a little.
May 16: Still continues considerably yellow. Was given a pill containing 1/2 gr. Potassium & 1 gr. Aloes.
May 17: Has taken meat within the last 18 hours. Remains weak and is rather drowsy most of the time.
May 28: Taken away (by his brother who was a physician).15
The last entry notes that Male Patient 1 died at home six weeks later.
The asylum records contain many other instances of men, especially older men, hospitalized for depression and worry surrounding financial circumstances. Male Patient 150, a sixty-year-old farmer, is another example. He entered the asylum for an illness “one year of duration, the exciting cause of which is Financial Embarassment.” Some remained preoccupied with finances while in the asylum, writing for money to purchase clothes or as repayment of debt. Families of men who were depressed, violent, and out of work brought them to the asylum as a last resort. A thirty-year-old man from Chillicothe was hospitalized with “melancholia with incipient dementia (caused by) failure in business.”16 A sixty-year-old man was hospitalized after having been “thrown out of employment” and having attempted “violence upon himself and others.”17 A farmer, age twenty-six and married, fell into a depression after the death of his father, complicated by financial worries and his responsibilities as executor of his father’s estate. The medical witness described the history of his case as “one month, for the first two weeks slight mental disturbance followed by violent fits of insanity. The cause is depression of mind from the recent death of his father, of whom he is Executor and anxiety relative to pecuniary matters.” The physician and the asylum also cited a “blow to the head” occasioned by a fall and injury to the right side of the head. The young farmer remained hospitalized at the asylum for a month, after which he was sent home “seemingly almost well.” Presumably the asylum’s regimen of rest and purposeful activity was more curative than the home treatment he received: “blistering the nape of the neck.”18 A fifty-year-old farmer from the Ohio River town of Portsmouth was committed by his wife in 1874 because he had attempted suicide by shooting himself. This man had been hospitalized twenty years earlier at the asylum in Columbus, Ohio, but was at home on his farm in 1874 when he attempted suicide.19 During the previous three weeks, he had “acted strangely, avoiding the society of friends and imagines there are men on the roof of his own house and sometimes that of his neighbors.” The medical witness and the asylum’s admission notes describe him as a man “with all sorts of delusions about his wife and children being in the fires at the boilerhouse” and who “sometimes imagines he is being robbed at night and goes about the house naked.” Hospitalized in February 1874, he arrived “at times very much depressed and thinks all his friends have deserted him.” Three months later he was “still very much discontented with being kept here,” and though his general health was good, he “did not eat much.” In July 1874, his condition was much the same. The casebook records that in July he “got outside one day and ran to the hill but did not attempt to go farther.” In September, he was taken home by his family.20
FIGURE 2.2 Letter and note from patient, 1880. Courtesy of the Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections, Ohio University Libraries.
The new asylum provided a place for southern Ohio’s poorhouses (also known as county homes or infirmaries) to relocate their residents thought to be mentally ill.21 Among the first patients admitted to the asylum at Athens were four women from the Ross County Home: Female Patients 3, 4, 5, and 6. Their cases for insanity, brought before the probate court in Chillicothe on the afternoon of January 16, 1874, had been prepared that morning by the physician attending the county home. The court determined that the women were unable to attend the probate hearing in the judge’s chambers, and they were represented, with no other witnesses, by the physician attending the county home. At the proceedings, they were all found to be insane and eligible for commitment to a state asylum. Two days later, the four women, one of them in a straitjacket, traveled together to Athens (accompanied by the Ross County sheriff) and were admitted to the asylum on January 19. The reports of the medical witness and the asylum casebook provide a glimpse into the lives and conditions of these four women from the poorhouse.
Female Patient 3, age thirty-two, was determined to have been mentally ill for five years. The physician serving as medical witness summarized the grim facts of her condition: “The cause of her illness is exposure after confinement (childbirth) with her last child, want, and a brutal husband. She appeared entirely recovered at the end of her first year (at the Infirmary) and was sent home but relapsed. Medical treatment has consisted of nourishing food and cold baths.”22
Female Patient 4, a forty-year-old widow, traveled to the asylum wearing “sleeves,” the Victorian name for a straitjacket. The physician determined that she had been insane for five years and wrote only of her history, “Cause unknown—was in Asylum at Columbus Ohio for three years past, then confined in the County Infirmary.” From the casebook we learn that she “was brought in sleeves by sheriff,” that she had been treated previously at the Central Asylum at Columbus for “paroxysms of excitement,” and that her health was “tolerable good” but her sight and hearing were failing. The casebook holds one note about her progress, written a few weeks later on February 2, 1874: “[She] remains much the same as when admitted—general health tolerable good, at times violent, destructive and dangerous.”
The medical witness physician made one note in regard to Female Patient 5, who was thirty-eight: “I found her at the Infirmary five years ago, insane—she has failed in her speech and articulation, in the last six months very much. The cause is unknown except her father was a drunkard and abusive. There have been no attempts of violence.” An asylum physician noted a few weeks after her admission that she “remains
