Asylum on the Hill: History of a Healing Landscape

Chapter One: The Moral Treatment Experiment

1 o n e Moral Treatment Experiment “A Magnificent Site Overlooking the Hocking Valley” On a spring day in 1865, Dr. William Parker Johnson returned home to Athens, Ohio, from the Civil War. He had been mustered out from Camp Dennison in Columbus, Ohio. Three weeks earlier, General Robert E. Lee had surrendered the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia to Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant. Dr. Johnson, known to friends and family as Park, was a country doctor. He had enlisted in the Eighteenth Ohio Volunteer Infantry as a physician and finished his war career as head of two post hospitals in Tennessee, where he found a calling as an organizer and administrator. He returned to Athens transformed from country doctor to experienced hospital administrator by his work caring for the ill and wounded of the Kentucky and Tennessee battlefields. Politics Men who survived the Civil War returned home to resume their lives; some were shattered in body or mind and others had gained new leadership skills and recognition for heroic achievements. The political careers of Ohio-born presidents Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, and William McKinley were launched by their service as Civil War officers.1 Dr. Johnson used his war experience and newly developed administrative skills to advance the care of those with mental illness in Ohio by orchestrating the founding of Ohio’s fifth state mental hospital, the Athens Lunatic Asylum. the 2 t h e m o r a l t r e at m e n t e x p e r i m e n t Post–CivilWarOhiowasofnationalsignificanceinthenineteenthcentury public mental health care movement sweeping the nation. The Ohio Lunatic Asylum, opened in the state’s capital of Columbus in 1838, was the first public asylum west of the Allegheny Mountains.2 Between 1838 and 1898, Ohio opened seven public asylums to provide mental health care for the state’s large and rapidly urbanizing population. All seven were devoted to care based on the newest humanitarian models of mental health care. Some of Ohio’s asylum physicians during this period attained national stature, publishing and providing leadership in the newly forming field of American psychiatry. And Ohio in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was an American political and economic powerhouse . Ohio sent five presidents to the White House between 1877 and 1901. Entrepreneurs such as Dr. B. F. Goodrich, Edward Libbey, and John D. Rockefeller established small businesses in Ohio that grew into giant industries. Ohio’s natural resources fueled the nation’s steel, natural gas, oil, and clay pipe industries, while the state’s railways and water transport on Lake Erie and the Ohio River provided a dense network of transportation between the East and the rapidly expanding markets of the West.3 In contrast to the urban centers of Cincinnati, Columbus, Toledo , Dayton, and Cleveland, Athens remains even today a small village in a remote rural corner of Ohio. Established in 1804 by the General Assembly of Ohio as the home for Ohio University, Athens was surveyed in 1795 by the Ohio Company, whose associates were among those who settled the midwestern wilderness under the Ordinance of the Northwest Territory, 1787.4 The village’s 1870 population of seventeen hundred persons and its isolated location in the steep, forested foothills at the edge of the Appalachian Mountains made it an extraordinary choice for the location of Ohio’s fifth state asylum. Dr. Johnson’s first year as a war doctor was difficult. He was often depressed and in despair about alleviating the human misery created by war, as he wrote to his wife, Julia, in Athens from Camp Jefferson at Bacon Creek, Kentucky, in June 1861: My shoulders are pretty broad and I guess I can go on awhile although I hope our regiment will not continue long in its distressed condition. I thought yesterday we were about through with measles but found seven new cases today. The chances for making the sick men comfortable figure 1.1 Dr. William Parker (“Parks”) Johnson, brigade surgeon in the Eighteenth Ohio Infantry. He was elected to the Ohio legislature in 1864 while serving in the Union Army. Courtesy of the Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections, Ohio University Libraries. figure 1.2 Julia Blackstone Johnson, wife of Dr. William Parker Johnson. Courtesy of the Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections, Ohio University Libraries. 4...