Insanity and idiocy in Massachusetts : report of the Commission on Lunacy, 1855 / by Edward Jarvis ; with a critical introduction by Gerald N. Grob.

  • Massachusetts. Commission on Lunacy (1854)
Date:
1971
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Insanity and idiocy in Massachusetts : report of the Commission on Lunacy, 1855 / by Edward Jarvis ; with a critical introduction by Gerald N. Grob. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    patients to their original place of residence. In order to deal with this dificult problem, the municipal authorities decided to establish their own institution, and in 1839 the Boston Lunatic Hospital received its first patients.*4 Nevertheless, the history of the Boston institution was essen- tially the same as that of the New York asylum. The hospital rapidly filled up with indigent and immigrant patients, and all pretenses at providing therapy were soon abandoned. In 1846, 90 out of 169 patients were foreign born, and the hospital had in effect become an institution for lower-class groups.** “Our inmates,” complained the superintendent in 1850, “are prin- cipally foreigners; and of this class a large majority are from Ireland... [The Irish] are generally found to be uneducated, superstitious, and jealous; and, being unused to the manners and customs of our countrymen, they are very suspicious of us; and therefore it is quite difficult to win their confidence, and of course, to treat them satisfactorily.”°* More than twenty years later the secretary of the Massachusetts Board of State Charities condemned the institution as completely unfit for either therapy or custody.” But despite a clear recognition by community leaders in Boston as early as the 1850’s that drastic action was required, the hospital continued to serve as a custodial institu- tion for lower-class groups.*8 The transformation of the state mental hospital into a cus- todial lower-class institution was also accompanied by the rise of exclusive private institutions caring for middle- and upper-class patients. Although many of the early mental hospitals estab- lished prior to 1850 were private, they had always attempted to 34 For the origins of the Boston Lunatic Hospital see the Memorial of the Board of Directors for Public Institutions in Relation to the Lunatic Hospital. 1863, Boston City Document No. 11 (1863), 21-23. 35 Boston Lunatic Hospital, Annual Report, 7 (1846), 11. See also zbid., 4 (1843), 15-16; tbid., 6 (1845), 16-17; abid., 9 (1848), 3-4. 36 Thid., 11 (1850), 15. 37 Massachusetts Board of State Charities, Annual Report, 10 (1873), 12. 38 Report of a Committee of the Board of Directors for Public Institutions in Relation to the Condition of the Lunatic Hospital, Made May 23, 1862 (Boston, 1862), 5-6; Memorial of the Board of Directors for Public Institutions in Relation to the Lunatic Hospital. 1863, Boston City Document No. 11 (1863), 23-39. Massachusetts, in addition to establishing the first comprehensive system of public mental hospitals, also used its state almshouses to care for chronic indigent cases of mental illness. The State Almshouse at Tewksbury by 1874 had over 300 insane inmates, and conditions there were about as substandard as those at any of the other charitable and penal institutions in the state. See the Annual Reports of the Massachusetts State Almshouse at Tewksbury, 3 (1856), 5-6; 5 (1858), 4-5; 8 (1861), 14; 13 (1866), 6-7; 21 (1874), 9-13, 33-34; and the Annual Reports of the Massachusetts Board of State Charities, 1 (1864), 265-266; 2 (1865), 149-150; 3 (1866), 150-151; 10 (1873), liv; 12 (1875), lviii-Ix.