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113 C h a p t e r 4 How Bad It Was “All Who Enter Here Leave Hope Behind” The 1909 national pellagra conference in Columbia was in many ways the high-water mark of collaboration,good will,and civic pride in the public response to the epidemic.As it became increasingly apparent that the disease struck mainly in pockets of poverty and deprivation,pellagra like hookworm became for many southerners an embarrassment they preferred to ignore. As historian Edward Beardsley puts it, “The South preferred to embrace paternalistic fantasies rather than uncomfortable realities.”1 While Babcock busied himself with the first national pellagra conference he could not ignore the uncomfortable realities in his backyard.The sorry conditions at the State Hospital for the Insane triggered an investigation by the state’s progressives, led by State Senator Niels Christensen Jr. of Beaufort County. Babcock’s lack of executive ability ultimately became the focus, leading to a recommendation that he and also the regents be dismissed.Babcock survived the investigation but not without further erosion of what little power he had over his subordinates. The Allegations While Babcock toured Europe with Tillman in 1908, a Columbia attorney named A. Hunter Gibbes had as a client a young man who had been jailed for fraud and then committed to the asylum on certificates from two physicians . The client wanted out but could not get a release. Gibbes talked with other inmates with similar complaints. He offered to get them out for $35 each.2 He snooped around the asylum and wrote a long letter to the legislature. As “one interested in the welfare of suffering humanity,” he felt How Bad It Was “All Who Enter Here Leave Hope Behind” 114 Asylum Doctor it his duty “to call your attention to some instances of mismanagement in the affairs of the State Hospital for the Insane.”3 Gibbes spared no detail. Negligence and brutality were the rule, not the exception. Gibbes charged “that many of the keepers or so-called nurses employed in the Hospital for the Insane are cruel to patients, grossly ignorant as to their duties and unworthy of their trusts.” A 65-year-old Confederate veteran “was cruelly and severely beaten and kicked by a keeper,” prompting relatives to take him home where he died within two hours. Another man “was assaulted by a so-called nurse, severely beaten on the head and face and kicked in the groins . . . [and] so completely disabled he was placed in the hospital ward.”Two nurses had been indicted on a charge of using counterfeit money made by a patient in the asylum.The nurses would “not infrequently require, under force of very effective persuasion, the patients committed to their charge to do their work,”whereupon the nurses would “idle away their time in bed or in other ways more congenial than the performance of the duties assigned to them.” Filth was everywhere. Some of the nurses would “bathe as many as twenty or twenty-five patients one after another in the same water, because forsooth the nurses are too lazy and indolent to take the trouble to change the water.” Gibbes added: “When it is borne in mind that some of these patients have loathsome diseases it is impossible to imagine conditions more filthy and horrible.”Because “most of the cooking . . . is performed by filthy Negro patients . . . the food is frequently unclean, improperly prepared and a positive source of danger to life and health.”The asylum dairy was “for the most part under the control of patients positively dirty, and who are totally ignorant as to the hygienic care in handling the milk used by patients.” Patients became de facto prisoners. A patient admitted in a drunken state might be “retained in custody for months at the expense of the State and people”after he sobered up.It was “common practice . . .not to release a patient, after he regains his sanity, unless some friend or relative voluntarily sees fit to interest himself in his behalf and agrees to be responsible for the patient’s future good conduct. In consequence of this practice ‘all who enter here leave hope behind.’”The patient without friends or relatives might be doomed to “pass the remainder of his life within [the asylum’s] walls, no matter how complete, no matter how sure, his mental soundness may be.” And because many “of these so-called lunatics are required to work in the dairy,on the farm,in the...

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