Tag Archives: overcrowding at asylums

Later Incompetence

Dr. Harry Hummer

Dr. Harry Hummer, the second (and last) superintendent of the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, created most of his own problems. He was a well-trained psychiatrist who had worked at the large government insane asylum, St. Elizabeths. Hummer took over a fairly new facility, but chose to concentrate his attention on administrative details and running the asylum’s farm rather than on his patients. He sought to keep expenses down by not filling the assistant superintendent’s position, thus making himself the only medical person on staff until nurses were assigned to the facility many years later.

Hummer had no excuse for the way patients were mismanaged. He was thoroughly capable of devising therapeutic plans for his patients, but never did. He kept many of the amusements Gifford had initiated and even built on them to a point, but discontinued other occupational-therapy types of activity, like beadwork.

Laundry Room, Northern Michagan Asylum for the Insane

Hummer was also responsible for his own overcrowding. Though he undoubtedly felt pressure to take in as many patients as possible, no one at the Indian Office was likely to have overruled him if he had put up a fight to keep his patient numbers down. Even though the Commissioner of Indian Affairs technically had the sole power to commit or release patients, commissioners nearly always bowed to Hummer’s recommendations.  Hummer continually complained about overcrowding, but used it as a reason to expand his facility. Hummer always had fewer than 100 patients, far less than the caseloads of other superintendents at other facilities. Yet, he quickly abandoned even the most rudimentary psychiatric examinations and relied on unschooled attendants’ notes to keep him apprised of patients’ mental conditions.

Patients at Worcester State Hospital, courtesy Life Magazine

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Skimping on Pay

Patients Working in Laundry Room at Texas State Lunatic Asylum, 1898

How much attendants were paid (see last post) mattered a great deal to superintendents, and generally not for the right reasons. The public began to exert extraordinary pressure on institutions to accept their afflicted family members, which resulted in overcrowding at nearly every insane asylum in the country. Doctors couldn’t cure patients when they had too many to properly care for, and asylums began to lose their roles as sanctuaries and restorative institutions.

With cure rates down, superintendents had to look for other reasons the public should continue to endorse the use of asylums. One argument was that it was much cheaper to keep patients at an asylum than at home or in jails. Many superintendents prided themselves on how cheaply they could run their asylums, and often compared their rates with unfavorably high rates at other asylums. Salaries were nearly always the largest single expense  at asylums, so superintendents had an incentive to hire the cheapest staff they could find. Unfortunately, as Beers pointed out, one could expect very little from an attendant who would work for eighteen dollars a month.

Patients on Floor in Eloise Women's Mental Ward in Michigan

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