carpenters, shoemakers, brewers, bakers, tailors, bookbinders, and printers. The occupations of female patients were not documented in the asylum’s annual reports—only women’s status as to whether they were married, widowed, or single. Each admission to the asylum was assigned a number; persons admitted more than once were given a new number each time they were admitted. The asylum used this numbering system until at least the 1950s.
Commitment documents and the asylum’s only surviving casebooks, large leather-bound volumes recording the admission and progress of patients admitted in 1874, reveal detailed stories. For some, the Athens Lunatic Asylum served a humanitarian function, providing respite for families desperate for help in caring for their mentally ill relatives and a safe haven for many patients. For others, the asylum was an agent of control, acting to preserve dominant economic interests and the moral sensibilities of a late Victorian-era community.
The asylum case records contain many examples of men and women in critical need of care. For example, Female Patient 454 was first hospitalized at age forty-eight, pregnant with her seventh child. “Whipped” by her husband and having just lost her sisters to consumption, she had her first “attack” of insanity. Four years later, at age fifty-two with seven children to care for, an abusive spouse to contend with, and in ill health, the asylum again provided respite care for her as Female Patient 1175.27
FIGURE 1.7 Medical certificate presented to probate court for the purpose of committing Female Patient 1175. Courtesy of the Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections, Ohio University Libraries.
Female Patient 1296, burdened with worries and delusions, was admitted in the summer of 1883 when she was thirty-four years old. She and her young daughter lived with her mother in a farming community. The committing physician wrote of her:
She has Insomnia and is unreasonable in conversation. [She has] ill feeling toward her mother and daughter whom she has always loved and cared for. She has constant fear of coming to poverty and dying in the poorhouse. She has had a great deal of trouble with business and domestic relations. Has paroxysms of scolding and using profane language. Very nervous, wakeful and anxious about business. General health is not good. . . . She has threatened to put her child out of the way and imagines her physician wants to marry her, if she was only rid of her little girl.28
Male Patient 35, a saddler from Columbus, Ohio, was despondent over having lost money through a business transaction and tried to hang himself several times. His wife, worried about his well-being and safety, took him before the county probate judge for commitment, and he was admitted to the Athens asylum. Fifteen months later, deemed recovered, he was taken home by his wife.29
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,
