Category Archives: 1900s newspapers

Newspapers in the 1900s were full of opinion and misinformation. They usually contained personal tidbits about local people

Alienists Gain Prominence

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Print of Assassination Attempt, which appeared in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, July 16, 1881, courtesy Library of Congress

Charles Julius Guiteau shot President James Garfield at the Pennsylvania railroad station in Washington, DC on July 2, 1881. He did not try to escape and was apprehended on the spot; when the president died twelve weeks later, Guiteau went on trial for his murder. The public was fascinated and the trial became something of a media circus, with Guiteau’s behavior as avidly reported as the points made by the attorneys for the prosecution and defense. Continue reading →

Tragedy After the War

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President William McKinley, courtesy Library of Congress

President William McKinley, courtesy Library of Congress

Theodore Roosevelt’s public life soared after the Spanish-American War, but the president in office during that war suffered tragedy before his term ended.

An anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, shot President McKinley at the Pan American Exposition on September 6, 1901.

McKinley died of his wounds on the 14th, and Roosevelt took office. Continue reading →

Closing the Century

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Secretary of State, John Hay

The end of the nineteenth century brought about the beginning of the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians. Indian agent Peter Couchman had suggested a separate facility for Indian patients in 1897, Senator Richard Pettigrew had endorsed the suggestion, and the Indian Bureau had cooperated in forwarding his cause.

The asylum, however, was a relatively minor matter for most of the country’s population, who focused, instead, on the Spanish-American War. Continue reading →

Ideas About Mental Health Evolved

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Emil Kraepelin, circa 1920, a Modern Alienist Who Identified Schizophrenia

Emil Kraepelin, circa 1920, a Modern Alienist Who Identified Schizophrenia

The notion of insanity  has been around almost since early cultures recognized that a spectrum of human behavior existed. Ideas about insanity have fluctuated throughout time, however. What was considered aberrant behavior in one era wasn’t considered so abnormal in another, just as so-called “normal” behaviors have changed over time. Continue reading →

Operations and Options for Insanity

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Insane Asylum at Kankakee

Along with solid advances in science, the late 1800s and early 1900s saw plenty of faddish cures for ailments.

In 1899, the New York Times reported on a young man, Irwin Fuller Bush, considered hopelessly insane, who had been restored to health through an operation. Continue reading →

Sorrow, Vice, and Thyroids

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Many Physicians Believed Insanity Stemmed from Physical Causes

Some of the new ideas about insanity and ways to prevent it helped doctors believe in cures after a long period in which they had resigned themselves to believing that most insanity was chronic.

An article from the November 12, 1922 edition of The Washington Post quoted Dr. Toulouse, a renowned French alienist, who had founded the League for Mental Hygiene and Prophylaxis. He believed that “half the occupants of the world’s insane asylums are not mad, but diseased.” Continue reading →

Compassionate Doctors

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Dr. William A. White, Superintendent at St. Elizabeths, courtesy National Institutes of Health

Dr. William A. White, Superintendent at St. Elizabeths

Though many abuses toward patients  were either condoned or ignored by senior staff, some doctors cared very much about patient abuse.

When Dr. William A. White took over as superintendent of St. Elizabeths (the federal government’s hospital for insane soldiers, sailors, and citizens of Washington, D.C.), he immediately issued a terse letter absolutely revoking use of the saddle (a harness fashioned around a patient in bed and tied so that he/she could not raise up) as a restraining device. Continue reading →

Patients Not Always Coerced

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Catharine Beecher

People who realized they were having problems coping with life often voluntarily sought cures for their mental distress. Catharine Beecher, sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe and later co-author with her of a very successful book entitled American Woman’s Home, or Principles of Domestic Science (1869), found the rigors of earning her living overly taxing. Continue reading →

Language Barriers

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Public Health Service Staff Inspecting Immigrants. All idiots, insane persons, etc. were to be excluded from the country, courtesy National Institutes of Health

Public Health Service Staff Inspecting Immigrants. All idiots, insane persons, etc. were to be excluded from the country, courtesy National Institutes of Health

As asylums grew larger and lost their ability to integrate mentally ill or temporarily distraught citizens back into society, they became warehouses for people who could not cope with or mesh into the current culture. Most asylums assumed a custodial role, rather than a therapeutic one. Continue reading →

Case Study

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Man With Apoplexy, courtesy National Institutes of Health, History of Medicine

Man With Apoplexy, courtesy National Institutes of Health, History of Medicine

Asylum doctors tried hard to share information about the developing field of psychiatry, and sometimes discussed interesting cases in journals. In the January, 1869, issue of the American Journal of Insanity, Dr. Judson Andrews gave details about a fifteen-year-old-boy brought into his asylum. Continue reading →