Gracefully Insane (5 page)

The published version of Folsom’s diary even includes the asylum’s regular weekly menu. Breakfast rarely varied: bread, butter, cheese, and coffee or cocoa. “Supper every day” was Souchong tea, bread and butter, and perhaps toast. Then came

Patients’ relatives dropped in often, as did the trustees’ Visiting Committee, who took their duties seriously; either Folsom or Wyman escorted them through the premises once a week. In town for the Bunker Hill festivities, the Marquis de Lafayette was supposed to visit the asylum, but he lingered too long at the Massachusetts General Hospital across the river and never showed up. One dignitary who made a point of including McLean on his itinerary was His Highness Bernhard, Duke of Saxe Weimar-Eisenach, who appears in Folsom’s diary:

Aside from presenting an engaging portrait of life at McLean under the old regime, Folsom’s diary also contains numerous allusions to his own health problems and his vain attempts to cure them:

Subject to headaches, fatigue, and malaise, Folsom doses himself liberally with the purgative cochineal throughout 1825. “Ol. Ric.” is oil of ricin, derived from the seeds of the castor-oil plant. One reader of the diary has even suggested that Folsom was a hypochondriac. Perhaps. But if so, he was a very sick hypochondriac, because he died of unknown causes two years after leaving McLean, just after his twenty-fourth birthday.

Modern times eventually closed in on the flowering Barrell estate.
What had been a pleasant, rural setting in 1825 had, just fifty years later, become an urban slum. Four railway lines now girded the property, and the constant chugging, clanging, and whistling drove the McLean staff, well, mad. There was always the fear that an escaped patient might throw him- or herself onto the rails; at least one did. Filthy metalworking factories, a bleaching and dying plant, and even a hog slaughterhouse moved into the neighborhood. A local newspaper remarked that “while the [asylum] has been building up and beautifying within, the opposite has been going on without. What with slaughter houses, miasmatic swamps, the area may be said to be slightly unpleasant if not very unhealthy.”

By the time an “eloped” patient died trying to board a freight train to freedom in 1888, the trustees had already decided to move.

Enter Frederick Law Olmsted, already in the prime of his career, with three magnificent asylum jobs under his belt: Retreat Park in Hartford, the Buffalo State Asylum, and the Bloomingdale Asylum outside of New York. Olmsted believed in the curative powers
of sculptured landscape, whether for harried urban dwellers roaming Central Park or for the “harmless monomaniacs” destined to inhabit his retreats or asylums. His designs ran counter to the prevailing notions of asylum construction, which followed the dictates of the so-called Kirkbride plan. According to Dr. Thomas Kirkbride’s theory, asylums should be built like hospitals, with large wards attached to a primary administration building. The Kirkbride layout made sense for the public institutions of the time, which had large patient populations and tiny medical staffs. Garrisoned in the central building, doctors could find their way to patients quickly. Its primary disadvantage was that it lumped the curable in with the chronic, the quiet with the excited, and the rich with the poor.

Olmsted and his partner, Calvert Vaux, were designing in a new tradition, which placed wards in separate buildings linked, in the case of Buffalo, by covered porticoes or, at McLean, by underground tunnels. The Olmsted-Vaux arrangement had many advantages for patients. Typically, they enjoyed more space in the mansion-style houses that dotted an Olmsted asylum and were not crammed into one overcrowded men’s or women’s ward. Furthermore, by the end of the century, asylum administrators realized that patients fared better and even recovered when surrounded by patients with similar maladies. To this end, the decentralized Olmsted-Vaux designs segregated patients by degree of affliction. The “worried well” lived in wards that were more like homes, and they could roam the grounds with appropriate permission. Cynically, but perhaps realistically, the Olmsted-Vaux plans relegated deeply disturbed patients to the periphery of the grounds, where their rantings resounded offstage. Perhaps most importantly, in an era when McLean’s “inmates” were finally being called “patients,” the Olmsted-Vaux design represented a radical break with the “lunatic hospital” look. After Olmsted landscaped the Hartford Retreat in 1863, director John Butler erected a small horticultural museum on the property and threw open the asylum gates to the public, boasting that

Butler summarized the new landscaping program: “Kill out the Lunatic Hospital and develop the home!”

The Olmsted-Vaux design, as implemented by McLean’s deeppocketed trustees, created some very comfortable living quarters. The Belmont plan called for 160 private patient rooms, a slight decrease from the Somerville census. Twenty of those rooms were private apartments, with parlors, bedchambers, and bathrooms. The first two houses built, Appleton and Upham, sported large, oak-paneled reception rooms with views over the surrounding countryside, intimate dining rooms with large windows, and deep, open fireplaces. The kitchens, the laundries, the heating, and the plumbing and sanitary facilities were the most modern available. The weekly cost of a McLean stay quadrupled, from $5 to $20. Among other comforts, that fee financed a 2:1 patient-to-staff ratio; publicly supported asylums had a 10:1 ratio or worse.

Indeed, as historian Silvia Sutton notes, for patients who hailed from a certain stratum of Boston society, McLean looked a lot like home:

How did the patients fare in the move? The brusque change of environment could have been severely destabilizing, but the McLean administration had planned ahead. The Somerville patient count had been drawn down to about 120, partly by freezing admissions and also by discharging chronic cases deemed too unsteady for the change. Closer to the actual date, many of the remaining patients began to worry that they would be paraded through the streets of Somerville and Cambridge, subject to taunts and jeers from onlookers. But the transition was handled with aplomb. During the month of October 1895, small groups of patients were invited to go for carriage rides, a common group recreation. But these carriage rides ended up inside the elegant new grounds in Belmont. “Then, one day,” writes medical historian Grace Whiting Myers, “much to their surprise, they found that they were all in the new McLean; and as for the public, they read about it in the newspapers after it was all over.”

The insane asylum seems to be the goal of every good and conscious Bostonian, babies and insanity the two leading topics. So and so has a baby. She becomes insane and goes to Somerville, baby grows up and promptly retires to Somerville.

 

 

 

I
n modern times, McLean would become famous not only as a
therapeutic locus but also as a literary and artistic landscape. Even in increasingly grubby Charlestown, which was starting to attract unsavory factories and slaughterhouses, McLean had its share of what we might now call celebrity patients. Two of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s brothers lodged in Charlestown. Robert Bulkeley Emerson was retarded from birth and spent many years in and out of the hospital, as the family’s finances permitted. When not at McLean, he boarded in a rooming house and sometimes helped out on Israel Putnam’s farm in Chelmsford. More tragically, in
1828, another brother, Edward Bliss Emerson, suffered an unexpected nervous breakdown and was sent to McLean. Edward’s institutionalization weighed heavily on his older brother Ralph, who was somewhat in awe of Edward’s accomplishments. The boy had finished second in his Harvard class, unlike Ralph Waldo, who finished thirtieth out of thirty-nine; Edward had just been accepted into law practice with Daniel Webster. It is from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s pen that we have one of the first descriptions of the shock a family member experiences when visiting a loved one in the mental hospital:

Edward died of tuberculosis at age twenty-nine. Robert lived in the Boston area until he died at age fifty-two.

Emerson had another McLean connection, one that he documented more thoroughly than his familial ones. At the recommendation of Miss Elizabeth Peabody of Salem, Emerson befriended a young Harvard Greek tutor and poet named Jones Very. Even by the standards of Emerson’s eccentric inner circle, Very was odd. At the beginning of the 1838 academic year, Very shared with his students and his supervising professor the news that he was the Son of God and that the Second Coming of Christ was at hand. This was news Harvard apparently was not ready to hear. The tutor was shipped back to Salem, where he played a similar trick on his friend, Miss Peabody. Invading her
parlor early one Sunday morning, he placed his hands on her head and announced that he had come to baptize her with the Holy Ghost and with fire (Matthew III, Chapter 11).

“I feel no change,” Miss Peabody told Very.

“But you will,” said Very. Soon afterwards, one of his cousins had him forcibly removed to McLean.

Very spent only a month in the hospital, lecturing the patients on poetry and Shakespeare and regaining some inner calm. Upon his return, the Salem locals credited McLean’s superintendent Luther Bell with saving the tutor and poet “from the delusion of being a prophet extraordinaire.” They thought this had been accomplished by righting Very’s “digestive system,” which had been “entirely out of order.”

Emerson embraced Very upon his release, inviting him out to his Concord home and even editing a book of his poems, gratis, for publication. But some members of Emerson’s coterie still bristled at the presence of this high-maintenance divine. Bronson Alcott, an oddball himself, praised Very as “a mystic of the most ideal class ... a phenomenon quite remarkable in this age of sensualism and idolatry” but complained that Very was “insane with God” and “diswitted in the contemplation of the holiness of Divinity.”

Then, almost as dramatically as he had acted up, Very inexplicably calmed down. “Very no longer felt God-directed,” according to Emerson’s biographer John McAleer. “The result was he had become a dull fellow.” He returned to Salem, where he lived quietly for another thirty-two years. “His kindly, careworn face,” McAleer writes, was “a melancholy reminder to those who saw it of the afflatus that had, for a brief moment, exalted him before it departed forever.”