Asylum on the Hill: History of a Healing Landscape

Chapter Six: Caregivers

144 s i x C aregivers “To Take Proper Care of the Insane Requires Talents of a High Order” Chief Cook Elizabeth McCole walked through the empty kitchen on a Thursday night in 1887 checking the supplies she and her staff of five women would need for Friday morning. This was her thirteenth year of service at the asylum in Athens, having begun work there as a cook the year it opened. It was a big job, preparing three meals a day for nearly eight hundred patients, over a hundred staff, and the resident officers.1 Tomorrow morning there would be buckwheat cakes, eggs, potatoes, and applesauce for patients; dinner at noon would be fish and boiled beef with bread and buttermilk; for supper, cornmeal mush with syrup and prunes, potatoes, meat stew, and bread and butter. The asylum’s chief cook oversaw two kitchens: one that prepared meals for the officers and another for the patients and employees. The officers’ table featured fine tableware such as silver butter dishes and water goblets. Preparing three meals a day, providing clean laundry, and maintaining hygienic surroundings while also undertaking the psychiatric and medical care of eight hundred plus patients amid sometimes chaotic conditions such as suicide attempts, “noisy” patients, flickering gaslight, roads thick with mud, and problems with sewage was a considerable task. The moral treatment regimen at the asylum required the work of dozens of men and women attendants who provided direct patient care; specialized staff such as tinners, bakers, laundresses, cooks, engineers, firemen, upholsterers, gardeners , clerks, hostlers, seamstresses, and druggists; and a small professional staff of officers. Working together, they arranged for and supervised the outdoor airings and exercise, white-tableclothed dining rooms, fresh flowers, Sunday afternoon concerts, routine “To Take Proper Care of the Insane Requires Talents of a High Order” 145 medical care, trips to town, and all the material needs for the entire asylum community. The half dozen women staffing the asylum kitchens turned out three hefty meals a day for patients and staff. Meat and potatoes figured prominently at each meal, including breakfast. The published weekly patients’ bill of fare for 1891 offered only prunes, applesauce, kraut, corn, cabbage, and turnips; fresh fruits and vegetables were limited to those produced by the asylum in its gardens and orchards. By the mid-1880s the asylum’s gardening operations, for which much of the labor was provided by patients, had begun to produce substantial quantities. Fresh string beans, radishes, spinach, tomatoes, squash, beets, cauliflower, celery, and other vegetables were harvested and served at the officers’ table as well as to patients . Hundreds of gallons of fruit and vegetables were canned and preserved for use during the year: peach butter, raspberry jam, cherries, pears, plums, grapes, and gooseberries as well as tomatoes and pickles. The asylum’s German-born tinner, Athens resident Frank Schloss, provided the kitchen staff with cans to preserve fruit. In 1886, the kitchen staff, with the help of patients, canned over a thousand gallons of cherries from the asylum’s orchards. The farming operations also provided delicacies such as crates of strawberries for the officers’ dining table as well as enough asparagus in the spring for staff and patients. figure 6.1 Weekly menu for the patients’ dining room; the published menu was supplemented with fresh seasonal fruits and vegetables from the asylum’s orchards and gardens. In 1891, the year of the publication of this bill of fare, the asylum kitchens served three meals a day to an average of 852 patients. Board of Trustees of the Athens Lunatic Asylum, 1891 annual report, 404. Image provided by the State Library of Ohio. Before the new patient dining rooms opened in 1887, meals were prepared in the kitchen and taken to the wards. The new system of central dining rooms, one for male patients and one for female patients , allowed the kitchen staff to serve meals while they were fresh and hot. Each dining room had a serving room furnished with urns of hot tea and coffee and a large steam table for keeping food warm. When the food was ready, the kitchen sent a runner to signal the asylum’s central exchange telephone operator to ring the wards and alert attendants to bring their patients. Wards One through Five, with quieter patients, ate in a dining room separate from the patients from wards Six through Nine, who were more disturbed (in...