shock, or combat stress reaction, was not diagnosed or defined during the Civil War, but its soldiers could not avoid the effects of war.40 Civil War physicians referred to stragglers, soldiers afflicted with nostalgia, and soldier’s heart. Stragglers were soldiers who sat trembling and clutching their weapons, staring into the distance, exhibiting a startle response at any loud sound, and incapable of engaging in battle. At Antietam, for instance, a third of the Confederates were labeled “stragglers.”41 Nostalgia, a term devised by a seventeenth-century Swiss physician, was characterized by homesickness and defiant aggression, which generally disappeared as soldiers began to prepare for battle, thus triggering the production of adrenaline and other stress hormones in their bodies. Soldier’s heart was a cardiac disorder featuring very high heart rates, palpitations, and inability to perform physical work. The asylum at Athens admitted Civil War veterans who suffered from the war’s emotional and physical trauma. Some mothers and fathers of men killed in the war were committed because of the trauma of their loss.
Finally, Ohioans suffered during the six-year Long Depression. Triggered by the Panic of 1873, this period of economic decline wreaked havoc across the United States, bankrupting railroads, destroying businesses, and raising unemployment to 14 percent. In Ohio, Governor Edward Noyes devoted his inaugural address in 1873 to the economic disaster, outlining its effects on Ohioans:
A few months ago, that undefinable but tremendous power, called a money panic, imparted a violent shock to the whole industrial and property system of the country.
The well-considered plans and calculations of all men engaged in active business, or in the exertion of active labor, were suddenly and thoroughly deranged. In the universal business anarchy that ensued, the minds of men became more or less bewildered, so that few among them were able distinctly to see their way, or know what to do or what to omit, even through the brief futurity of a single week. All values and all incomes were instantly and deeply depressed. There was not a farmer, a manufacturer, a merchant, a mechanic, or a laborer, who did not feel that he was less able to meet his engagements or pay his taxes than he had been before. The distressful effect of this state of things was felt by all, but it was more grievously felt by the great body of the laboring people, because it touched them at the vital point of subsistence.42
As a result of this economic disaster, when the asylum at Athens opened in 1874 many of its first patients were men and women depressed and suicidal about business failure and highly anxious with fears of poverty and want.
The work to create the Athens Lunatic Asylum began three years after the end of the Civil War, and hopes were high for this new institution. Its relatively small size, compared to its contemporary asylums in America and Europe, was considered a favorable point. “Large as it really is,” wrote Dr. Richard Gundry (superintendent of the Southern Asylum at Cincinnati) of its room for 570 patients, “it is eclipsed by several in extent and capacity. In New York, the asylum at Utica, with its 800 patients; the New York city asylum, with its 1400 patients; in France La Salpetriere, with its 1400 patients. . . . [I]n England, Colney Hatch or Hanwell, each having more than 1000 inmates.”43 The services of Dr. Gundry had been secured by the Athens asylum trustees for advice and assistance in completing the construction of the Athens facility. He continued in his 1872 report to the newly formed Board of Trustees of the Athens Lunatic Asylum to stress the Kirkbride model’s design preference for smaller asylums and the superiority of the asylum at Athens in this regard: “And indeed, while the enormous size of such institutions may be defended on the ground of economy in administration . . . it must be always borne in mind that the true interests of the insane would be better served by smaller institutions and more of them. . . . I repeat that few if any institutions, within my knowledge, will surpass this in the essential and fundamental requirements of all such buildings—the proportion of space, light and air to each patient.”44
Superintendents of the asylum at Athens were national leaders in limiting patient restraints, a departure from standard nineteenth-century American asylum practice. Ohio asylum superintendents debated their use, and at Athens superintendents consistently provided leadership for a national movement limiting patient restraint.45 Mechanical restraints such as straps and mittens, chemical restraints to control behavior, manual restraint provided by attendants, locked doors, and seclusion were used infrequently at Athens during the moral treatment years.46 In his 1872 report to the board, Dr. Gundry advised against constructing strong rooms where “excited” patients would be held when uncontrollable, advocating instead a small ward of individual rooms for such patients, to be “made as cheerful as for any other patients but so constructed as to resist the violence and mischief of the most excited.”47 Dr. Rutter, superintendent in 1877, commented in 1880 on the open-door practice:
Upon reassuming the duties of Superintendent, I was highly gratified to find that the open-doors system in some of the wards had been continued during my absence. It was, as some of you will doubtless remember, with many fears and some misgivings that I took the pioneer step in Ohio by removing the locks from some of the wards, and permitting full liberty to the patients they contained. That it was not ill-considered or reckless has been proved by the complete success of the experiment and it is a pleasure to add that in my opinion the system can be extended until comparatively few of our six hundred patients will be behind locks and bars.48
While other Ohio asylum physicians argued for the use of restraints as a benevolent practice, Athens superintendents during the moral treatment years believed that restraints were at odds with moral treatment and provided transparency to the public on their limited use through the annual reports of the Board of Trustees.49
The architecture of the Athens asylum was central to the moral treatment curative schema. Its light-filled rooms, wide corridors, Victorian reception parlors, windows situated to provide patients with beautiful and peaceful views of the landscape, ventilation powered by two enormous state-of-the-art brass basement fans manufactured in Pittsburgh, iron protective window grilles disguised as decorative mandalas, wards designed to segregate patients by their levels of disruptive behavior, and elimination of “strong rooms” were all thought vital to the treatment and cure of patients there. Daylight itself was considered curative, as described in near-reverent language by Ohio’s Board of State Charities in the 1880 annual report to the governor: “Light is not only cheap, it is a civilizer. Light is healthful, light is good in every way.”50 Flowers, raised in a glass conservatory, were abundant year-round. Superintendent W. H. Holden noted with satisfaction the floral supply: “The florist’s department, during the past year, has been exceedingly satisfactory, giving us a full supply of flowers for the general household, besides having abundance for the grounds where sufficiently completed to receive them. We have repaired our conservatory by a complete relaying of the glass. . . . [I]t is now in a better condition than ever before for the recuperation and preservation, through the winter, of the exotics and indigenous plants, in which the patients and visitors so much delight.”51
Superintendents and trustees during the asylum’s moral treatment years were eager to transform the asylum’s steep hills and wet bottomlands into beautiful, curative scenery. The grounds were considered to offer great natural beauties needing only grading and filling. This work, requiring blasting and shoveling massive amounts of rock and dirt into pans pulled by teams of horses and mules, was accomplished over twenty years with labor provided by male patients and paid townsmen. Superintendent Clarke requested eight thousand dollars in 1878 from the state for grading and lake improvements; the trustees wrote to the governor that “we have no hesitancy in asserting that the grounds surrounding this Asylum [when completed] will be second to none in the State for beauty of design or magnificence in scenery.”52 Dr. Clarke described the benefits of a beautiful landscape in terms of its curative function:
The slope in front of the eastern division of the building, in which are the female wards, remains untouched and presents a forbidding appearance. It should be brought to harmonize with the gracefully finished lawn lying in front of the western division as early as practicable not only for the
