Blog #1- Insane Asylums In the Early 19th Century

   Insane Asylums were much different in the 19th century than they are today. How well a patient was taken care of depended on what they could afford. If the patient was wealthier they could afford a smaller private asylum where the treatment was better and more personal to them. However for the vast majority of the patients that needed treatment, they had to check into a public hospital or large asylum that wasn't of the best quality. The hospitals were over crowded and extremely dirty. The windows had bars on them and because the nurses weren't paid well, the patients were often treated harshly.


Most physicians assumed that the mental illnesses and cases being brought into the hospital were caused by the nervous system. For this reason the patients were treated by using tactics such as hydro-therapy, electrical stimulation, and rest. A small number of the doctors abandoned the idea of the nervous system being the cause such as a man named Boris Sidis. Sidis recieved his Phd from Harvard and medical degree shortly after. He argued that the cause of the mental disorders was from the consciousness itself, the "data" of psychology and the subconscious as well. For this reason he used a form of hypnosis to gain conscious memories from his patients. When the patient would wake he would describe their memories to them thus curing them.

   Closer to the 1800s people used mentally ill people and observing them as an odd form of entertainment in the victorian era. Over time however the reality and danger became more prominent to the people and they no longer used it as a form of entertainment, but instead used it as a way to understand the medicine and treatments to educate themselves. Moving into the early 19th century, doctors came to realize that the privacy of the patients aided them in their recovery process and the tourism thus disappeared.

   When you think of asylums you think immediately that the patients were tortured and no one was treated properly, but as time passed the conditions gradually grew to a better state. As early as the 1800s physicians started realizing the best way to get their patients to recover was to treat them as ordinary people. They started to tailor to the patients and put patients with the same conditions in the same grouping. They even added birds and parrots in cages to brighten the atmosphere for the patients. Yes not everyone was taken care of the best they could have been, but going from the 1800s into the 1900s provided better care as the realization of the severity of mental health rose.

Box, Christy. “19th-Century Tourists Visited Mental Asylums Like They Were Theme Parks.” Ranker, 2 May 2019, www.ranker.com/list/asylum-visitors-in-the-nineteenth-century/christy-box.

Holtzman, Ellen. Monitor on Psychology, American Psychological Association, Mar. 2012, www.apa.org/monitor/2012/03/asylums.

Stevens, Mark. Life in the Victorian Asylum : The World of Nineteenth Century Mental Health Care. 2014. Web.

“A Victorian Mental Asylum.” Science Museum, 13 June 2018, www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/victorian-mental-asylum.