The Best Specimen of a Tyrant: The Ambitious Dr. Abraham Van Norstrand and the Wisconsin Insane Hospital

16. “A Solemn Court of Impeachment”

S I X T E E N A Solemn Court of Impeachment Hastings had left no stone unturned. Every patient capable of coherent conversation had been interviewed, every attendant and officer had been called to testify, former employees had been contacted by telegraph and letter, experts had been consulted, rumors had been tracked to the source and investigated, annual reports of superintendents throughout the nation had been reviewed, and the prices of everything from allspice to extract of valerian had been compared. In the end, the superintendent stood revealed as a scoundrel and a cheat.1 The pattern of the report was a series of contrasts—between theory and reality, between the hospital as depicted and experienced, and above all, between the superintendent as noble public figure and greedy despot. For guiding principles Hastings and Sherwood had turned to acknowledged experts like Thomas Kirkbride, Pliny Earle, Isaac Ray, and John Gray. They organized selected quotations by topic, assembling a series of gold standards by which to evaluate their own hospital. On the subject of discipline, for instance, their report quoted nine superintendents,from Massachusetts to California,each of whom rejected punishment as barbaric while extolling the therapeutic value of kindness. “Kindness is omnipotent with the insane,” wrote Dr. Workman of Toronto. “Punishment can only confirm their malady and transform them into brutes.” According to Dr. Isaac Ray, “The feature that characterizes the modern management 234฀฀•฀฀The Best Specimen of a Tyrant of the insane is the invariable use of kind and gentle treatment.” In an obscure report of the state legislature they found breathless praise to “the still, small and gentle dews of kindness to quench the fires of madness.” From the matter-of-fact to the mawkish, the authorities agreed: punishment did not work; kindness did.2 “But we must turn from this pleasant picture,” Hastings read, “to contemplate the sad and revolting state of the institution under charge of this board.” He unleashed a broadside of horrors: chokings , kickings, and beatings with fists, keys, and straps; of belting down, locking away, and near drowning. In Hastings’s telling, the bully who emerged most vividly from patients’ recollections was young Fred Van Norstrand: “‘I have seen Fred take a piece of meat on a fork and put it into a patient’s mouth and then take the handle of the fork and attempt to force it down. Have seen him strike the same patient on the head with his keys because he would not eat more. [He] died not long after.’” Fred even attacked a man who beat him at checkers and bragged about it. To see how the strong tyrannized the weak at the Wisconsin Insane Hospital you only had to watch the superintendent’s brutal son at work. Hastings posed the fundamental question: “Upon whom rests the responsibility for all this cruelty? We place this responsibility upon the superintendent.” The cold bath was subjected to the same exhaustive scrutiny— the opinions of experts, all of whom rejected it as likely to kill the patient—balanced against the testimony of attendants who recited the same old story: legs hanging over the tub, arms held or tied, the torso pinned, the resisting head plunged, the panic and struggle, the waiting. Who was responsible? The superintendent “did know of these abuses [Hastings’s emphasis], and some of the most flagrant wrongs were committed by his express orders.”3 He knew that choking was commonplace; he ordered the cold baths; he boxed ears, battered a woman in restraints until she was black and blue, yanked patients to their feet by the hair, choked, attacked and threw them against the wall. He ordered attendants to feed a man his own excrement and to rub his face in it. Thus did Hastings assemble likenesses of father and son, one a raging tyrant, the other a spiteful thug. His examination of the Kellogg affair began with another study in contrasts: the comforting assurances of earlier investigating committees set against the superintendent’s lies and evasions. He ended with a thundering rebuke. No information had been withheld by the family. Reverend Kellogg had never displayed homicidal or suicidal tendencies. The superintendent’s claims to the contrary were self-serving distortions. The patient almost certainly suffered “kicks and cuffs, blows and chokings” from the sour-tempered attendants who dragged him upstairs.The strong room was almost certainly not heated, the shutters were not locked...