The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United by Carla Yanni

The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United by Carla Yanni

By Carla Yanni

Elaborately conceived, grandly built insane asylums—ranging in visual appeal from classical temples to Gothic castles—were as soon as a typical sight looming at the outskirts of yankee cities and towns. a lot of those constructions have been razed in the past, and those who stay stand as grim reminders of a frequently merciless procedure. for a lot of the 19th century, even if, those asylums epitomized the commonly held trust between medical professionals and social reformers that madness used to be a curable affliction and that environment—architecture in particular—was the simplest technique of remedy.   within the structure of insanity, Carla Yanni tells a compelling tale of healing layout, from America’s earliest purpose—built associations for the insane to the asylum development frenzy within the moment 1/2 the century. on the middle of Yanni’s inquiry is Dr. Thomas Kirkbride, a Pennsylvania-born Quaker, who within the 1840s devised a unique approach to apartment the mentally diseased that emphasised segregation by way of severity of disorder, ease of remedy and surveillance, and air flow. After the Civil battle, American architects designed Kirkbride-plan hospitals around the kingdom.   ahead of the tip of the century, curiosity within the Kirkbride plan had began to say no. a few of the asylums had deteriorated into human warehouses, strengthening arguments opposed to the monolithic constructions recommended through Kirkbride. while, the clinical occupation begun embracing a extra neurological method of psychological affliction that thought of structure as mostly beside the point to its remedy.   Generously illustrated, The structure of insanity is a clean and unique examine the yankee scientific establishment’s century-long preoccupation with healing structure with a view to healing social ills.   Carla Yanni is affiliate professor of artwork background at Rutgers collage and the writer of Nature’s Museums: Victorian technological know-how and the structure of exhibit.

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36 Harsh medical treatments, however, were common; attendants attempted to deplete the madman’s bodily systems, and thus caused patients to bleed, blister, and vomit. The hospital’s chronicler and librarian, William Gunn Malin, described a “long garret” for twelve to fifteen males to sleep in and another garret for fourteen females in 1832. The Pennsylvania Hospital was located in the Center City area of Philadelphia. By the 1830s, it was a crowded urban neighborhood, and thus the air that surrounded it was not considered salubrious for a medical or mental hospital.

Asylums even regularly entertained visitors, a social role that was equally expected of manor houses. Social hierarchy was replicated inside the asylum walls. If one knows anything about Bethlem, it is probably that the place operated as a kind of freak show and human zoo, with paying customers gaping at the inmates. Although visiting was a popular pastime, recent scholarship has revised and tempered the famous myth. The lavish architecture was a large part of the spectacle. Visitors did not actually pay admission, although they were asked to give alms, and hollow figural sculptures served as poor boxes just inside the door of Hooke’s Bethlem.

4. Dance, St. Luke’s Lunatic Hospital, women’s ward, interior, as illustrated in Augustus Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson, Microcosm of London (London: Ackerman, 1808–11; reprint 1947). Courtesy of Wellcome Library, London. 5. Robert Reid, Edinburgh Lunatic Asylum, 1807. This elevation shows one side of the quadrangle. The center three-story building was connected by covered passages to flanking two-story corner pavilions. Courtesy of Wellcome Library, London. Transforming the Treatment These two buildings were not copied very frequently in the United States, but they illustrate a sophisticated Enlightenment discourse about asylum architecture, as well as attention to categorization and social class.

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