Williamsburg Visit Prompts Reflections On Mental Illness
I had come to Williamsburg to meet its ghosts of revolutionaries and royalists, slaves and freedmen, preachers and painters, saddlemakers and tavern-keepers.
Instead, I met its long-ago lunatics.
In the city’s southwest corner, sleepy-eyed sheep and half-ton bulls ambled in patchwork fields rising and falling behind homes and craft shops. Beyond the dappled hills and dales, a large Georgian-era brick building stood stiffly in a field, elegant but intimidating. It seemed to dwarf the imposing facades of the town’s Capitol and Governor’s Palace, a mere five-minute walk away.
The unsparing repetition of its blushing bricks, its monumental length, and the fortresslike barrier of brown planks marshaled at either end conveyed a different kind of authority.
Pushing through an enormous door fit for a penitentiary, I entered America’s first psychiatric hospital, built in 1773 – the year of the Boston Tea Party. It was built “for the support and maintenance of Ideots, Lunaticks, and other Persons of unsound Minds,” according to a sign inside, citing the words of the law that established its charter.
This odd tourist attraction had not been on my itinerary. I was stunned to enter the first facility in America dedicated solely to the care and treatment of the insane.
I wondered: Who had dwelled here? Had this asylum carried out its mission? Had mentally ill patients been helped here?
Throughout history, the mentally disabled had been helped by shamans and healers of all kinds, with mixed results. This hospital hoped to offer new promise, symbolizing the new ideas about curing mental illness emerging in the century that produced Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Founding Father Benjamin Rush, of Philadelphia, called “the father of American psychiatry.”
I passed an 18th-century image of a man strapped in a “tranquilizer chair,” his head covered by a large wooden box. A narrow opening allowed the constrained man a kind of tunnel vision. I thought of the blinders used on horses to prevent them from seeing potentially disturbing movement and growing wild.
As I walked through reconstructed chambers where patients had passed their days, evidence abounded of science and superstition, kindness and callousness, cruelty and cure. Here laid the promise and pitfalls of those who hoped to assist the “manics” and “melancholics” under their care.
A cell from 1773 resembled the corner of a dungeon, complete with iron chain, manacles, and a filthy, straw-filled pad where the “patient” slept in the restraints.
An “apartment” from 1845 projected a more humane atmosphere, featuring a bed, a violin and bow, and a desk. Therapeutic tools included bleeding lances, feeding tubes, drug vials, and an electrical-shock device resembling a telegraph machine. Later, a spinning wheel, rocking chair, and playing cards were added. But some patients remained chronically ill.
In the late 19th century, before the 100-year-old hospital burned down, recalcitrant patients were enclosed in the Utica Crib, a coffinlike wooden box with mesh sides and metal locks.
As I turned to leave, I was struck by how far we had come, with our remarkable advances in medical science and modern-day therapies. Yet, clearly, much remained to be done. As one expert on the asylum reflected, “In that sense, we’re still in the early phases of a very old story.”
Philadelphia Inquirer
29 November 2009