Cincinnati’s Neglected Insane Asylum

SUMMER 2013 3 Cincinnati’s Neglected Insane Asylum Ann Clymer Bigelow I n the early nineteenth century a missionary spirit took hold in the United States. Growing out of what historians have called the Second Great Awakening, the reform movements of the era strived not only to save individual souls, but to remedy the evils of society. A growing number of Americans argued that government, especially state government, had a duty to see to the welfare of its citizens. In these years, reformers founded insane asylums, along with schools for the blind, deaf, and developmentally disabled, poorhouses, and prisons in the belief that “long-standing problems could be solved by conscious and purposeful human intervention.” Several factors prompted the development of asylum care for the mentally ill in the early antebellum years. A variety of social changes—urbanization, increasing employment outside the home, and the influx of immigrants some of whom had difficulty adjusting to their new environment —convinced many of the need to provide better care for troubled citizens.1 In addition, American doctors became familiar with the European practice of “moral treatment” for the insane, a “psychologically oriented therapy” that assumed patients’ confinement in a well-ordered asylum. The approach called for removing patients from their accustomed surroundings and placing them in a wholly new setting with a supportive ambience and as little restraint as possible . The daily regimen included labor, worship services, and recreation. Historian David J. Rothman writes that the superintendents of these asylums attributed their patients’ insanity to the era’s “chaos and disorder, a lack of fixity and stability,” and they set about “creat[ing]—in a way reminiscent of the founders of utopian communities —a model society of their own.” In contrast, Benjamin Reiss emphasizes that the “story of humanitarian intervention is also a story of domination.” He sees the asylum not as benevolent, but as an “institution with unprecedented powers to rescind the liberties of individuals and to enforce bourgeois norms of behavior on noncompliant, vulnerable subjects.” Sociologist Andrew Scull, in turn, calls “both these perspectives…too crude and one-sided,” and concludes that “in its origins, at least, nineteenth-century lunacy reform was Janus-faced.”2 Along with many remarkable successes, social reform had some failures, among them Cincinnati’s first organized effort at mental health care. Antebellum residents of the “Queen City” often displayed a concern for civic improvement , but for decades they neglected to provide proper accommodations CINCINNATI’S NEGLECTED INSANE ASYLUM 4 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY for housing and treating mentally ill citizens. Dr. Daniel Drake, who founded several of the city’s medical and educational institutions, saw to the building of the Commercial Hospital and Lunatic Asylum in 1821, with the asylum a small annex to the larger teaching hospital. But despite the concern and good intentions of Drake, criticism by prominent visitors, and Cincinnatians’ drive in the 1840s to erect other benevolent institutions, in the forty years the asylum operated it never amounted to anything more than a squalid little brick prison. A certain blind tolerance persisted about it, partly owing to feuds among local doctors. Not until citizens at large, influenced by the reform currents of the era and the dismal state of the institution, became awakened to the suffering of the insane did the city build a worthy facility, the state-of-the-art Longview Asylum which opened in 1860.3 During its first decades, Cincinnati, like most places in the new country, lacked a public safety net for the care of mentally ill residents. Families depended on their own resources to keep their deranged relatives safe and under control and to nurse them back to health as best they could. Otherwise, authorities confined the insane to jail or the poorhouse. The impetus for the city’s first insane asylum came in a roundabout way from the state of Louisiana. In 1820, Louisiana Governor Jacques Villeré forwarded a request from the state legislature to the governors of Ohio and the other states bordering the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers that they build hospitals for commercial boatmen falling ill en route north from New Orleans: Navigators and traders…arrive at New Orleans, generally, in good health[.] Either...