Hummer’s Advantages

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Commissioner Charles Rhoads, on left, courtesy Library of Congress

At the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, superintendent Dr. Harry R.  Hummer was far enough away from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to avoid direct supervision. Hummer outlasted five commissioners: Francis Leupp, Robert Valentine, Cato Sells, Charles Burke, and Charles Rhoads before commissioner John Collier threw him out of the asylum and the Indian Service.

One advantage Hummer had–as did other superintendents elsewhere–was that locals wanted the asylum to remain open and running. Insane asylums represented huge boosts to  local economies. Most towns or cities where asylums were located were quite happy about having them, and were proud of the work they did. Canton was no different. Locals enjoyed the employment and local contracts that came from the asylum and usually spoke of it quite enthusiastically.

When Hummer began to finally receive less than glowing reports, he managed to have some friends in Sioux Falls appointed as an inspection committee. They came through for him in a report to Commissioner Charles Burke early in 1929. “We went through the plant thoroughly from top to bottom and . . . found everything in first class condition.” The writer then concluded, “I consider Dr. Harry Hummer a wonderful superintendent of this institution and he has many fine employees.”

Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs

Sample Asylum Report, courtesy University of North Carolina

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Who Oversees the Asylum?

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Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Cato Sells

Asylum superintendents were very powerful, but they were (theoretically) denied free rein. Most asylums had a board of directors or a board of commissioners to give oversight to the entire asylum, including the superintendent. Boards were often composed of local men who might be assumed to know what was going on, though sometimes board members had to travel from a distance to meet. Not all boards had direct hiring and firing authority, however, and could run into problems controlling or disciplining a superintendent protected by appointment.

At the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, superintendents reported directly to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs on the other side of the country. No boards met on a regular basis to supervise the asylum, though visiting doctors within the Indian Service occasionally stopped by to inspect and report on the facility. Because they weren’t trained in psychiatry and therefore not competent to discuss patient treatment, most inspectors concentrated on the physical part of the institution, commenting more on its buildings and farming operation than anything else. Sometimes the inspectors were not even doctors, but merely field agents who happened to be in the area. Because of this situation, it was generally easy for superintendents Gifford and Hummer to explain away any problems inspectors might bring up.

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Insane Asylum Oversight

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Canton Main Street

Just as in other workplaces, insane asylums had personnel problems that administrators had to deal with. Though some superintendents tried hard to find the best attendants possible, they had to ultimately accept the kinds of employees available in the marketplace. In 1895,the superintendent at  Kentucky’s Eastern Lunatic Asylum mentioned that he had been able to employ “four bright young men from the State College.” Other institutions, and probably Eastern Asylum as well, had to sometimes accept attendants who were just a step above criminals. With its demanding schedule and lack of freedom, a job as an asylum attendant was not likely to appeal to anyone who could find something better.

Both Gifford and Hummer, while superintendents at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, ran into the same personnel problems as other superintendents. The work they offered was demanding and difficult, and didn’t pay well. They faced an additional problem with the size of their labor pool. Canton was not large, and even though the city of Sioux Falls was not far away, it was too far away to expect many people there to find work at the Canton asylum desirable. Attendants were required to live on the premises, which also made the work less attractive to non-Canton residents.

Staff at Ridges

Attendants at Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane, circa 1860s, courtesy University of Pennsylvania

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Real Experiments

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Sanctioned Treatment

In a sense, alienists experimented on the insane all the time. Moral therapy–the kindest treatment up to that moment–was a huge experiment on the part of entire nations. Some individual asylum superintendents tried various methods of controlling or helping patients, from restraining them or not restraining them, moving them to nicer wards based on behavior, and trying out a number of medicines and tonics to help patients physically. Some of these experiments were bizarre, hurtful, and sometimes, helpful.

However, some experiments were simply cruel. In the 1940s, Dr. W. Paul Havens exposed mental patients in Connecticut to hepatitis as part of a series of experiments. In 1942, doctors experimented with flu vaccines on mental patients in Michigan.

In Nazi Germany, experimentation on the helpless flourished. When they needed to find a better way to kill prisoners than by shooting them, Nazis experimented first with explosives. They locked mental patients in bunkers outside Minsk and blew them up, but found the method time-consuming and inefficient. They then experimented with a poison gas on mental patients in  Mogilev, which proved to be a superior method. Beginning in 1934, Nazis sterilized people they thought shouldn’t have children, including the insane, but eventually just killed them as citizens unworthy of living. The U.S. sterilized women in mental hospitals as well, long before Nazis did. Indiana passed the country’s first sterilization law in 1907.

Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele (second to left)

Eugenics Tree, 1921

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Experimental Psychology

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Women Working on Farm as Part of Moral Therapy

In a general sense, patients at asylums were always an experiment in progress. Most alienists didn’t understand why people became insane, and didn’t really know how to cure insanity. Moral therapy, a relatively benign treatment, relied on the idea that a disciplined, busy schedule with plenty of sympathetic conversation, would take patients’ minds off their troubles and help them synch back up with society. Except for the situation itself (being in an insane asylum), this therapy was a fairly gentle attempt to help patients. Many, who perhaps only needed a change of scenery or some diversion to break a melancholy train of thought, probably did benefit from this therapy.

Some twentieth century therapies were more extreme.  The last stages of syphilis produced symptoms of insanity, and the condition was usually called “syphilitic insanity.” Doctors infected patients with malaria, hoping the high fever would stop syphilis’s progress. Julius Wagner-Jauregg won a Nobel prize for this therapy. Another leading psychiatrist gave schizophrenic patients high doses of barbiturates to induce deep sleep as a treatment. Another treatment for schizophrenia was insulin shock, in which doctors injected patients with large doses of insulin to produce comas. This therapy was used until the 1950s.

Fever Therapy

Insulin Shock Therapy

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Colored Asylums

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West Virginia Hospital for the Insane

In comparison with whites, few African-Americans were sent to insane asylums. Some asylums did not want to accept black patients at all, while others put black patients in separate wards. Some states created separate asylums entirely for the “colored insane,” apparently subscribing to influential alienist Thomas Kirkbride’s view that “colors and classes” should not be mixed in insane asylums.

The West Virginia Hospital for the Insane was fairly typical. Its board of directors recognized the need to provide care for “colored” patients, yet didn’t feel the asylum could accept them until it had room to separate the races. The asylum did begin to accept black patients sometime in the late 1880s, placing them in separate wards from whites. In 1893, the board of directors asked for $6,000 to build a colored hospital. Shamefully, this request was made even though the asylum only had 44 colored patients. In 1900, when the asylum housed 1,001 patients, only 68 of them were African-American.

Eastern Asylum for the Colored Insane, Goldsboro, NC

Mount Vernon Hospital for the Colored Insane, courtesy Reynolds Historical Library

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Alternative Homes for the Insane

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Johnson County (Iowa) Poor Farm and Asylum, courtesy Johnson County Historical Society

The U.S., like most countries,  had groups of people who failed to be self-sufficient. Widows and orphans, the unemployed, the elderly,  the sick (and sometimes criminals), fell into this category  when they had no families to help sustain them. England had usually looked to workhouses to take this population off its hands. Though they were seldom of the same punitive nature as English workhouses, a few American workhouses placed inmates in cells or put them in chains.

Like the English, Americans tended to resent people who fell upon public aid or did not do their share to sustain themselves.  In the U.S., many communities relied on poor farms to aid people who were unable to find work or keep a home for their families. Farm work was something the population understood, and even children could contribute their share by helping with tasks suited to their age and ability. There was still a great deal of shame and stigma attached to “going to the poor farm,” and most people wanted to avoid it.

Before large public asylums became more available, insane people were often sent to workhouses and poor farms when they had no one to care for them. These places  could offer nothing in the way of therapy, and these unfortunates were often doomed to a life spent in unhappy conditions.

Men Working in Broom Factory at Poorhouse circa 1915

Poor Farm in Buckheart Township, Illinois

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Newspapers (Don’t) Enlighten

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Newspaper Article

For all their faults, insane asylum superintendents tried hard to ease the stigma of insanity. They wanted families to bring their loved ones for help, without shame or fear of criticism. Community newspapers often praised the work of the local asylum and its staff, but generally, newspapers and other media did little to help the superintendents in their quest to ease the embarrassment associated with insanity. Here are some typical quotes:

“Another account says that eighteen raving maniacs were burned to death in the insane department at the Blockley alms-house on the west side of the Schuylkill River . . .” from the Rochester, NY Democrat Chronicle, Feb. 13, 1885.

“To allay their fears, and to quiet the excitement which many of them began to exhibit . . . the lunatics were told that there was to be a dance in the Amusement Hall.” New York Times, 1879.

Obituary notice: “Brought to the Eastern Kentucky Lunatic Asylum in this city [Lexington] three days ago a raving maniac, Mrs. Jennie Centers, aged 23, died at that institution Thursday night of  exhaustion from acute mania.” The Leader, January 12, 1907.

“Fredrick J. French, an electric light trimmer, received a shock and became a raving maniac this morning while at work on the top of the slender iron tower in front of the city hall building. ” p. 127, Western Electrician, Volume XIV, 1894.

Blockley Almshouse, courtesy University of Pennsylvania Archives

Illustration of Railroad Passenger Afraid He is Sitting Beside a Dangerous Lunatic, Mr. Punch's Railway Book, courtesy Project Gutenberg

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Holidays at Asylums

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Morningside Hospital, courtesy Library of Congress

Though most asylum superintendents believed that their home environments had caused patients’ insanity, superintendents also realized that establishing a type of normalcy in their institutions was important for a cure. Many boasted, of course, that their institutions had a homelike atmosphere and that the patients and staff were like a large family. Just like families, then, patients had routines that included regular schedules, chores, and the occasional festive break.

It was normally too difficult to take patients to church, but most asylums held some sort of church services on a regular basis. They also tried to provide occasional entertainments like dances, plays, and lectures, and celebrate holidays. Their hearts may have been in the right place, but it surely added to their patients’ heartache to spend a special occasion in an insane asylum instead of at home.

Christmas at Morningside Hospital, Portland, Oregon, circa 1920s, courtesy Oregon Historical Society

Inside Morningside

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A Long Day

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Western Lunatic Asylum Medical Staff, 1896

Attendants had a difficult job in any asylum, and the ones at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians were no exception. Besides their special duties when new patients arrived (see last post), they were in charge of general housekeeping on their wards. They were in immediate charge of the nursing of their patients, including the dispensing of medicine and changing surgical dressings. They had to make complete notes about the physical and mental condition of every patient at least once a month.

Attendants were to keep patients comfortable and clean, bathing and changing them as necessary. They had to look after bedding, sweeping, dusting, brightening the floors, hardware, plumbing, fixtures, etc. in their patients’ rooms, as well as clean the lavatories and toilets. Attendants had to accompany patients who could take outdoor exercise, and direct patients in any work tasks they were able to do. Attendants also waited table during meals, submitted a report to the superintendent each morning on any changes in their patients, and accompanied the superintendent and/or physician while he made his rounds.

In 1907, male attendants were paid $480 annually, and female attendants $420. This amounts to $11,500 and $10,100 in today’s dollars, using a Consumer Price Index calculator.

Attendants at Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane, circa 1860s, courtesy University of Pennsylvania

Nurses at St. Elizabeths, 1917, courtesy Library of Congress

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