Asylum on the hill : history of a healing landscape

235 Pages·2012·4.357 MB·English

by  Katherine Ziff & Samuel T Gladding

A
sylum
on the hill
history of a healing landscape
Katherine Ziff
foreword by samuel t. gladding
Asylum on the hill

A
sylum
on the hill
history of a healing landscape
K a t h e r i n e Z i f f
foreword by Samuel t. Gladding
ohio university Press Athens
ohio university Press, Athens, ohio 45701
ohioswallow.com
© 2012 by ohio university Press
All rights reserved
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material from ohio university Press publications, please contact our rights
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Printed in the united states of America
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20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ziff, Katherine K.
Asylum on the hill : history of a healing landscape / Katherine Ziff ; foreword
by samuel t. Gladding.
p. ; cm.
includes bibliographical references and index.
isBn 978-0-8214-1973-1 (hc : alk. paper)
i. title.
[Dnlm: 1. Athens lunatic Asylum (Athens, ohio) 2. hospitals, Psychiatric
history ohio. 3. empathy ohio. 4. history, 19th Century ohio. 5. mental
Disorders therapy ohio. 6. Professional-Patient Relations ohio. 7. Psychiatry
history ohio.
Wm 28 AO3]
362.2109771 dc23
2011041136
Contents
Foreword by samuel t. Gladding vii
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
1 the moral treatment experiment
“A Magnificent Site Overlooking the Hocking Valley”
1

2 Patients
“Each Admission Represented a Poor, Helpless, Hopeless Sufferer”
25
3 Architecture
“Space, Light and Air to Each Patient”
63
4 Politics
“Partisan Interests and Personal Place-Seeking”
105
5 landscape
“Of Beautiful and Varied Scenery”
125
6 Caregivers
“To Take Proper Care of the Insane Requires Talents
of a High Order”
144
epilogue 165
notes 193
Bibliography 209
index 215
v

Foreword
some books are a joy to read. they are filled with information that
is fascinating and informative. they entice you with their style,
and before you know it you are into the text wholeheartedly and
passionately. there is no logical explanation except that you are in-
trigued with what comes next and your expectations will not allow
you to do anything else but read on. Katherine Ziff’s Asylum on the
Hill: History of a Healing Landscape is such a work. it covers a fas-
cinating period in the history of American psychiatry that is now
vanished but left an indelible mark for the positive and progressive
impact it had on mental health care.
Dr. Ziff’s focus on the Athens asylum is specific to the treat-
ment of the mentally disturbed in ohio in the late 1800s and
captures a moment in time. it follows the ascendance of moral
therapy as a movement that was humane and effective with those
who were mentally distraught or thought to be such by their fami-
lies and society. Ziff chronicles the lives of individuals who were
admitted and treated, at least initially, from the moral therapy
perspective. she humanizes notes made in the margins of official
records of often-marginalized people who were in many ways
similar to those with mental disorders today. through a fascinat-
ing series of photographs, Dr. Ziff shows us what moral treat-
ment was like in both the planning and the implementation of
this unique way of helping the desperate, depressed, downtrodden,
demented, anxious, and discouraged. she brings the reader into
the sights, sounds, and even smells of post–Civil War America in
ohio. she describes, using the original records, the ways treatment
for the “insane” worked and did not work—at least in this rural
community in the midwest.
Dr. Ziff gives us an insider’s look at an asylum that dwarfed
other buildings in its surroundings and, though carefully constructed,
was not always lovingly cared for. she depicts the people—the pa-
tients and their families—who occupied the halls and challenged
the minds of the times as individuals much like many Americans
today. she traces the rationale for the moral therapy movement,
vii
its successes, and why it faded in its effectiveness and funding. she
explains the reasons the movement, like those it touched, had a life
but then failed to survive, let alone thrive. her portraits of people
who influenced the asylum are wonderfully rendered in words
and pictures. this historical examination of the hocking Valley,
its people, and the asylum that impacted them is alive and mov-
ing. the extensive information within the pages of this text makes
what was existentially enchanting relevant to our time.
thus, when reading this book, a person is drawn past olden
times and into scenes that have a universal dimension to them.
the history of the past becomes a present reality; the people de-
scribed become our neighbors—only from an earlier era. We can
see ourselves and those we know in these individuals and in the
treatment they received. likewise, we know the caregivers, politi-
cians, and landscapes within this story, for though shaped in the
late 1800s, they are the forebearers and even the standard-bearers
of the society that has since evolved and in which we live.
Anyone who peruses Ziff’s work will not have an easy time
putting it down. this book is more than a history of a time, a place,
a movement, and a people. it is instead a sensitive and centered
examination of growth and regression in the understanding of hu-
mankind amid stress, development, and regression. it is an excep-
tional peek into what life is and can be, along with what life has
been. it is about a time and a movement that will always be timeless
and moving in their emphasis on health, wholeness, and helping.
through Katherine Ziff, Athens, ohio, and moral therapy come to
life and become inescapably intertwined with our lives!
samuel t. Gladding, PhD
Chair and Professor, Department of Counseling
Wake Forest University
viii foreword
Preface
in 1867 the ohio legislature laid the foundation for a twenty-year
experiment in moral treatment psychiatry at Athens, a small vil-
lage in the rural southeastern corner of the state. Built to Ameri-
can psychiatry’s nineteenth-century gold standard, the Kirkbride
plan for moral treatment, the Athens lunatic Asylum proposed to
cure its patients with orderly routines, beautiful views of the coun-
tryside, exposure to the arts, a built environment with abundant
natural light and plenty of ventilation, outdoor exercise, useful oc-
cupation, and personal attention from a physician. its restorative
landscape and efforts to offer humane treatment were a revolu-
tion in care for those with mental illness and stand in contrast to
hundreds of years of treatment featuring confinement, restraint,
and punishment. nearly a century and a half later, the asylum is
making new history as one of the most fully realized examples of
the repurposing of old Kirkbride buildings into a university and
community resource.
i moved to Athens, ohio, in 1998. on the first day of my first
visit to town, i walked with my son over to the Ridges, the new
name for the complex of buildings and landscape that were once
the Athens lunatic Asylum. As we climbed the steep hill to watch
bicycle racers rattle over the brick drive around the old asylum
buildings, my first impression was of trees. to reach the impos-
ing brick buildings, we walked through a small grove of towering
evergreens, remnants of the original landscape planted more than
a century ago by landscape gardener George link and the group
of asylum patients who served as his work crew. the buildings and
their grounds sit on top of a long and substantial terrace flanking
the hocking River, formed two million years ago in a collision of
geology and climate change in southeastern ohio. if you drive
down Route 33 from Columbus, ohio, toward Athens, just after
you pass through lancaster you will see, as we say in southeastern
ohio, “where the glacier stopped.” there the flat terrain gives way
to gentle hills that become steeper as you get to Athens, following
highway 33, which crosses the hocking River twice. As rivers go,
ix