and applications of nitrate of silver the chancre healed, eruptions & sore throat disappeared. She remained under my care 2 1/2 months when I regarded her cured. She told me that she was engaged to be married, time had been set—I told her the danger of getting married in that condition and advised her to postpone the day indefinitely[.] [T]his she said [she] could not do and was married since [that] time in April[.] [O]n her way to the home of her husband they stopped in Zanesville and consulted a quack doctor by the name of ______. Without any vaginal examination he pronounced her badly diseased and pregnant—and sent her back to her father. On Wednesday May 20th she started from her father’s with the view of joining her husband. She stopped in Zanesville and consulted the Quack[;] prior to leaving home she tried to poison herself with strychnine. She purchased in Zanesville a beautiful blue silk dress, with kid slippers and other articles of dress to match and returned to this city on Saturday May 23rd. She came to my office (after an absence of some 8 weeks). I made an examination and could not find any evidence of disease. Tried hard to satisfy her . . . and told her to seek the advice of some regular physician. She took that . . . advice and again chose a quack. After this she proceeded at once to the carrying out of her plan. First on Tuesday at 10 and 10 1/2 PM and [again] Wednesday 4 AM she took a dose of morphine in all 45 grains. I saw her on Wednesday 11 AM, found her pupils contracted, voice husky, said she had vomited after each dose. Under threat that her trunk should be examined she gave me up what Morphine she had left & said she would go on with her husband. Her father came before she got started and the moment she heard his voice she shot herself. . . . The cause of her insanity is very plain I think. I expect that under your professional care & skill she will be returned entirely cured both in body and mind.
Yours,
______, MD
The new bride entered the asylum at Athens four days later on June 5 as Female Patient 277.
In 1874, another bride was found to be insane and was hospitalized with witness provided by two female friends. Distraught that she had married the wrong man, Female Patient 242 was suicidal and had to be watched constantly by friends. The physician explained, “The exciting cause is as I learn Matrimonial disappointment. She is sane on some subjects and has perfect lucid intervals in which she is sane on all. She has attempted violence upon herself. I am of [the] opinion that if confined for a few weeks under kind treatment, that she will entirely recover as suicide is her only Mania.” The probate judge added a separate letter explaining the situation to the superintendent:
Dr. Gundry
Dear Sir:
Inclosed please find papers in case of ______[,] a married lady[;] it appears that she is sensible of having disappointed someone else by Marrying her present husband and for that reason she ought to put herself out of the way of all. She finds no fault with her husband[.] She has repeatedly attempted Suicide by different means. Her friends are compelled to guard her continually, she seems to be reasonable in other matters. Please reply at your earliest convenience, as she is being kept here to wait the reply.
Respectfully etc.
J. C. Evans
PJ [Probate Judge]
The sights, sounds, and injuries of the battlefields of the American Civil War induced trauma and illness that, for some, resulted in commitment to the asylum. Male Patient 216, from a farm along the Ohio River, was hospitalized because of a mental illness dating from 1865. His physician wrote that the cause of his illness was “Typhoid fever, from which he suffered while in the Army during the year of 1864. [He] has made attempts of violence upon his family and others.” This veteran had been a private in the 91st Regiment of the Ohio Infantry. Before his illness, he participated in the West Virginia war theater, including a raid up the Kanawha River and pursuit of Morgan’s Raiders.
Male Patient 231, a private in the 188th Ohio Infantry, was admitted to the Athens asylum in 1874 following ten years of mental illness attributed to the trauma of the sounds of battle. His physician describes his case, which dated from 1864, as a “case of chronic mania, he was in an asylum about five years ago. The cause is nervous derangement, probably acquired while in the Army. He received a sudden shock from cannonading.”
Male Patient 3 enlisted in the Ohio 77th Infantry Regiment at the age of fifteen and endured near-constant battle conditions until the war’s end, when he had his first “attack” of mental illness. The medical report committing him in 1874 noted, “About seven years ago [he] had an attack lasting two or three months, has had three or four attacks since. He has made threats of violence upon himself and also upon others.” The teenager fought with his regiment in the spring of 1862 at Shiloh, the bloodiest battle in U.S. history at that time. Descriptions of the battlefield at Shiloh note the corpse-littered ground, creating a deadly psychological effect. The young soldier pressed on with his unit to the siege of Corinth, then to Chickamauga, and finally to the siege of Atlanta before falling psychologically ill.
Some Civil War veterans were sent to asylums because their violent behavior could not be controlled at home. Male Patient 243, a private in the Ohio Infantry, was hospitalized at Athens in 1874, according to the medical witness because of a blow on the head received while in the U.S. Army in 1863, when he was fifteen years old. He was soon hospitalized in the state asylum at Columbus, Ohio, which burned in 1868, no doubt creating further trauma for this veteran. Since then he had been confined at home, in Marietta, Ohio, “subject to paroxysms of violent mania.” His father initiated his second hospitalization when the Athens asylum opened in 1874.
Families of soldiers who were killed suffered as well. Some were unable to recover and required hospitalization. An Ohio mother, age sixty-four, remained stricken with grief over the death of her son in the war, and her family brought her for commitment to the asylum, where she became Female Patient 286. The medical witness noted,
This is to certify that I have this day examined Mrs. ______, a Widow Lady about 64 years of age, and find her labouring under that species of Insanity known by the name of Monia Mania, arriseing from the distress caused by her son, being killed in the late War[.] [S]he has been three times to the Asylum, and discharged each time cured[;] she has been home from the Asylum this last time two years and four months, continued Well and undisturbed in her mind until the first day of Last March, when she began to show symptoms of mental aberration—Since which time she has been more or less noisy and troublesome, being more so whenever the subject matter of her son is brought to her mind[.] [T]he Physical health is good, [and she] has been under no medical treatment, I therefore feel confident that removal to some asylum where she can get a proper Treatment will soon restore her Mind.
Another mother, Female Patient 749, was hospitalized in 1874 because of “grief of the death of her son in the Army.”
Male Patient 819, age twenty-eight, was admitted to the asylum by way of special legislation passed by the Ohio General Assembly. He had been sent to Athens from his family home in Philadelphia to live with an uncle. Because he was not a resident of Ohio, an act of the Ohio General Assembly was required for his admission to the asylum. His admission papers consist of a small certificate with a two-and-a-half-inch red wax seal signed by the Ohio secretary of state. Once in the asylum, he penned a series of plaintive notes to family members and to asylum physicians asking for help in going home. Written in purple ink, some in English and others in German, the letters were never sent but kept instead in asylum files. The undated letters repeatedly inquire about coming home; one letter directs his uncle in Athens to send him a drum over at the asylum.
To Emil S., N. 6th Street Philadelphia
Dear brother Emil
I am wanting to wait to get home. I will inform you how I am getting along which to let you know about my coming home, since 10 years away from home . . . telegraph immediately and want to know whether farther is
