“A place of padlocks and chamber pots”

Race, Class, and Mental Health

The asylum is a microcosm of the society in which it exists. As such, it is unsurprising that the experiences of Black, indigenous, poor, and immigrant inmates were often considerably more trying than the experiences of their white counterparts in the 19th century asylum. While this exhibition has attempted to centralize the narratives told by asylum inmates, it will necessarily falter when attempting to tell the story of those most marginalized, as their voices were most effectively silenced. Without resources to self-publish, or advocates to aid their release, or even doctors who understood their language, having their voices heard a century and more later requires particularly close and critical listening on our part. We look for their agency in any evidence that remains, and keep in mind that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Edward Jarvis, Insanity Among the Coloured Population of the Free States (Philadelphia, 1844).

The sixth census of the United States in 1840 was the first to attempt to quantify people with various disabilities, including the broad and undefined category “insane and idiots.” The results indicated that there was a much greater incidence of insanity/idiocy among the free Black population of the northern states than among the Black (undifferentiated by free/enslaved) population of the southern states. Slavery proponents used the census results to claim that freedom caused insanity in Black people. Physician Edward Jarvis (1803-1884) found the census deeply flawed. Through a comparison of the total “coloured” population numbers next to those for the “coloured insane” from the same town, he showed a manifest discrepancy. How could there exist so many insane Black people in towns with no Black residents? Mounting political pressure led to a reexamination of the census results, by the same individual who oversaw them in 1840. He issued no correction.

Richard J. Dunglison, Statistics of Insanity in the United States (Philadelphia, 1860).

The backlash to the 1840 census led to changes in the census-taking process for 1850. The results in 1850 proved so dramatically different from 1840 that some refused to believe their accuracy. The question of how the white population could go from a ratio of 1 in 977 insane to 1 in 688 in ten years caused consternation. The dramatic decrease in insanity among the Black population, from 1 in 978 to 1 in 1,929 was likewise met with cynicism. These discrepancies were so implausible to supporters of slavery that they served as proof of the relative accuracy of the earlier census.

Illustrations from Longview Asylum, Seventeenth Annual Report of the Board of Directors … for the Year 1866 (Columbus, 1867). Reproductions.

Through the 19th century and well into the 20th, many American asylums segregated Black and white patients, either in different wards or, as in the case of the Longview Asylum in Cincinnati, in separate buildings. Longview opened in 1860. By 1866, the number of African Americans being treated for mental illness in Ohio had increased to such a level as to prompt the building of a new structure to meet this increased need. These two illustrations, both of which served as frontispieces for the 1866 annual report, were meant to bolster the image of the institution. The facility for white patients is shown as a stately Kirkbride-style structure, complete with idyllic grounds and frolicking children (safely across the canal from the inmates). A smokestack in the background suggests the industry and self-sufficiency of the institution. In contrast, the facility constructed for patients of color, while certainly well-kept, is shown separated from the general population not by a picturesque canal, but by an ironwork fence. Here, the children do not frolic, but instead point and stare with one hand, while clinging to their father with the other. A rearing horse and its rider, in the center foreground, also give a carceral impression of the building and grounds.

J.F. Miller, The Effects of Emancipation upon the Mental and Physical Health of the Negro of the South (ca. 1896).

The concept of the psychological peril of freedom for Black people did not abate after the abolition of slavery. This article from 1896 by the head of an asylum in North Carolina provides evidence from census data of a continued increase of insanity among Black populations since the end of slavery to prove the benefits of slavery. Of the enslaved African American, he writes “he spent his quiet humble life in his little log cabin, with his master to care for every want of self and family, in sickness and in health.” In opposition, another North Carolina physician, J.D. Roberts (1852-1908), gave numerous explanations for the apparently lower incidence of mental illness among the enslaved, including “fear of the driver’s lash.”

Illustration from A.H. Witmer, Insanity in the Colored Race in the United States (St. Louis, 1891). Gift of Charles E. Rosenberg.

In 1890, Dr. Abraham Harman Witmer (1848-1900) of the Government Hospital for the Insane, later St. Elizabeth’s, presented this paper to the Tenth International Medical Congress in Berlin. Witmer used census data to highlight rapidly increasing rates of insanity among African Americans, which, he explains, had grown to be nearly on a level with that among the white population. He attributes this to the “timid, suspicious and emotional” nature of African Americans, rather than to an increase in diagnosis and treatment of an illness that always existed but, under slavery, was impossible to quantify.

“Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane,” The American Journal of Insanity, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Utica, July 1857).

Like African Americans in asylums, immigrants, the poor, and other individuals living on the margins of society might receive differential treatment from physicians based on prevailing stereotypes. In this report of a meeting of the superintendents of asylums, several of the attendees shared their experiences with and thoughts on the curability of the Irish American insane. The difference in opinion is not insignificant, but the question that started the conversation, and the complete absence of a challenge to it, is perhaps most notable. Dr. Andrew McFarland (1817-1891) of the Illinois Hospital for the Insane asked if the birthplace of a patient would affect their recovery, “or was it owing, as in the Irish, to their low grade of intellect?”

Henrietta Briggs-Wall, American Woman and her Political Peers (Hutchinson, Kansas, 1893). Gelatin silver on cabinet card mount.

Suffragist Henrietta Briggs-Wall (1849-1930) designed this illustration based on stereotypes and rooted in prejudice to build support for woman suffrage. When asked about the “shocking” image, Briggs-Wall explained, as reported in the Marion Star, that “it takes a shock to arouse some people to a sense of injustice and degradation.” For this image to be shocking in the way Briggs-Wall intended, the viewer must believe that the four men portrayed were rightly denied the vote. Only the white woman (represented here by reformer Frances E. Willard (1839-1898)) is mistreated by placing her in the pantheon shown. It was in this political climate that the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians was created. The doubly disenfranchised “insane Indian” had little power over their own fate once they entered its doors. Many never left and their stories are still untold.

Indian Asylum, Canton, S. Dak. (Albert Lea, Minnesota: The Big 4 Post Card Co., ca. 1920). Gelatin silver postcard.

The Canton Asylum for Insane Indians in South Dakota, sometimes called Hiawatha, began accepting patients in 1903. The conditions at Canton were so abysmal that the institution was shut down in 1934. During its operation, just over 300 patients entered its doors. Far fewer left. The relatively small number of patients at the facility in its over thirty-year history was due to an abnormally low discharge rate, as controlled by its superintendent Dr. Harry Hummer (1878-1957). Regardless of evidence of sanity—and by all accounts most patients were not mentally ill—or family pleas, or even orders from his superiors, Hummer was reticent to release any patient he considered mentally inferior without their first being sterilized. Without on-site facilities to sterilize patients, he argued, he could not discharge them. Hummer reported the average number of discharges per year at ten. Of those, nine were discharged through death. A municipal golf course now occupies the former grounds of Hiawatha. Between the fourth and fifth fairways, a split-rail fence marks off a cemetery of unmarked graves that holds the remains of at least 121 former patients.

Lucy Gladstone, History of Lucy Gladstone as Written by Herself, March 12, 1911 (Canton, 1911). From the patient file of Lucy Gladstone. Reproduction of digital file. Original in National Archives and Records Administration, National Archives identifier 140126725.

In 1911, Lucy Gladstone was committed to the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians. As noted elsewhere in this exhibition, it is difficult, at best, to identify historical first-person accounts of asylum life or mental illness from members of marginalized communities, other than (white) women. Occasionally, a patient history can reveal what their lives were like. As Gladstone recounts, she was asked to provide her history upon her admittance to the Canton Asylum. She describes a life story of suffering, abuse, alcoholism, and poverty. Gladstone uses one word to describe her state of mind upon arriving at Canton: disappointed.

View more images here.

Click here to listen to a passage from Lucy Gladstone’s History, read by Mary Kierst-Krahel.