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

14. “Little Short of Murderous Neglect”

F O U R T E E N Little Short of Murderous Neglect Van Norstrand faced not only the credibility dilemma shared by every superintendent—that enormous gap between expectation and reality—but real problems of his own making. He was impulsive. He did attack patients. Unlike Thomas Kirkbride in Philadelphia and John Butler at the Hartford Retreat in Connecticut, he seems not to have evaluated patient progress based upon searching one-to-one conversations but upon more general perceptions of appropriateness and compliance.1 Those who toed the line got better. Those who made themselves disagreeable did not. And it was true, his sister-inlaw was no Florence Nightingale, his wife no Dorothea Dix. Thank God for that! Of course they were not always equal to the occasion. Who would be? And what ruler’s idiosyncrasies did not appear outrageous through the eyes of disgruntled underlings? Smoldering below all this was the Kellogg affair. Hastings was certain to fan it back to life. Along with God knew what else. On March 12, Van Norstrand would have a chance to set things right. By artfully bullying and charming naive attendants, his opponents on the committee had isolated examples of necessary discipline from the volatile ebb and flow of daily life on the wards and turned them into something monstrous. Through crossexamination he must deflate these misrepresentations and put them in perspective. For one thing, few insane were the wounded pets Hastings and Sherwood were so intent on depicting. Many were shameless, vicious, and conniving. Attendants must be made to shed 208฀฀•฀฀The Best Specimen of a Tyrant light on how dangerous ward life could be, how deceptively peaceful it all appeared to outsiders, the order and symmetry of long quiet hallways lit from ranks of open doorways on each side, the sedate sitting rooms, the enormity of the physical plant imbuing the visitor with a false sense of security when in fact only stern rules promptly enforced kept the lid on. He got his first witness, John Mooney, to clarify his earlier remarks about choking. This was done only “to keep them off of me and to conquer them,” not to injure. The same had been true when he knocked people down. He had not hit them with his fists but had “thrown them down; tripped them up.” But what Van Norstrand had failed to anticipate was that every such effort at damage control gave Hastings and Sherwood an opportunity to turn his witness against him, thereby wreaking even more havoc. Hastings asked Mooney if he knew of cases of “cruel or harsh” treatment. Mooney—one of those who had angered the superintendent by coming back drunk from the nearby tavern—responded with an account of how the superintendent dealt with the infamous Thunderbolt: “[Thunderbolt] was shut in the strong room [where] he plastered his manure over the walls and door.The doctor [told us] to make him eat it or stick his nose in it. Me and Miller made him do it.” During the cold bath that followed, his head was submerged “until he gave up.” Van Norstrand rose to protest: “The patient smeared the hand hold of the door with his manure. The attendant could not reach through the door and give the patient a cup of water without soiling his clothes.” Hastings asked for more examples of the superintendent’s aggressiveness . Mooney recalled three incidents when Van Norstrand slapped, kicked, or otherwise assaulted patients. Again the superintendent protested: “J_____ and H_____ were both exceedingly violent when they were excited. They were excited at these times. Violent and abusive.” Next came Herbert Bird, who explained that by “knee to the chest” he did not mean that he intended to hurt the patient with the point of his knee but only to restrain him, using his leg to pin the person to the floor. Van Norstrand pressed Bird to acknowledge that the incidents of choking had occurred without his knowledge but ran into unexpected resistance. “You never caught us at it, [but] you knew it was commonly done because I reported two cases to you, and I supposed others had.” Sherwood asked Bird about attendants who drank on the job. The only person Bird identified by name was young Fred Van Norstrand . Sherwood asked for examples of “cruel or harsh” treatment of patients, and Bird described how the superintendent had “cuffed very severely” several patients, grabbed one...