Letters from Asylumia: The Opal and the Cultural Work of the Lunatic Asylum, 1851-1860

On 24 October 1843, A. S. M., a 38-year-old doctor from Columbia County, New York, was brought by his brother to the New York State Lunatic Asylum at Utica. ¹ According to his case file, he was a voracious reader who had been deranged intermittently for about 15 years, with recent bouts of sleeplessness, confusion, loquaciousness, and "irregular habits of dress." In his first year at Utica, he seemed "happy and contented." The asylum was, in some ways, a good match for A. S. M. Founded only 10 months earlier under the leadership of the charismatic superintendent Amariah Brigham, the Utica asylum quickly became the nerve center of the newly emerging psychiatric profession and one of the most innovative centers of the "moral treatment" movement. ²

Although asylum physicians insisted that insanity was at root a disease of the brain that called for medical intervention, they also believed that mental illness often had a psychological or "moral" etiology and that a carefully controlled environment was essential to the cure. Patients' cultural and social activities were to be nurtured and closely monitored, and such activities as reading, writing, performing plays, worshipping in chapel, and learning useful—even marketable—skills were considered integral components of treatment. As the institutional home for the American Journal of Insanity, the Utica asylum played a crucial role in formalizing and disseminating key aspects of this mode of treatment. ³ A. S. M. took full advantage of the cultural program at Utica: he joined the patients' debating society; he spent long hours in the library; he composed speeches at asylum anniversaries and fairs; and he even found himself formally addressing Millard Fillmore on the president's visit to the asylum in 1851.

In that same year, he became the editor of the patients' new literary journal, the Opal, and he would become perhaps its most frequent

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Figure 1 Cover of the Opal. The illustration, done by an asylum artist, depicts Philippe Pinel, founder of the "moral treatment" movement in France. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

contributor throughout its decade-long run. The journal contained a mixture of fiction, poetry, religious writings, dramatic sketches, occasional pieces, literary exercises, political commentary, patient memoirs, open letters, "healing" narratives, and cultural critique. It is, however, at best an elliptical record of the lives, thoughts, and experiences of the authors. If one wants a straight picture of asylum life drawn from the inside, the Opal is bound to disappoint. Accounts of the daily lives of patients are so cheery and sugarcoated as to be beyond credibility. Asylum life is most often pictured as a series of games, theatrical amusements, ceremonies, book-reading parties, learned conversations, and, occasionally, dramatic cures of insanity. The physicians are kindly father figures with nothing but humanitarian impulses; the attendants are professional and respectful; and the patients are intelligent, refined, and creative—if given to bouts of despondency. There is very little writing about madness itself—except for a few articles written from the safe perspective of former patients or convalescents, who narrate their triumphs over illness—and few of the wild flights of imaginative fancy or "the poetry of insanity" that theorists such as Pliny Earle were beginning to take seriously in the writings of the insane. One could easily forget on reading the Opal that the asylum was an institution with unprecedented powers to rescind the liberties of the socially deviant or psychologically aberrant; that the patients were subject to the physicians' haphazard experimentation with serious drugs like opium and to their "cures" for problematic behavior that included cauterizing the genitals of masturbators; that attendants occasionally beat patients who challenged their authority; and that many of the patients themselves were violent, tore their clothing to shreds, smeared their faces with excrement, committed suicide, and ranted or sang out their hallucinations into the night. ^4...