Kirkbride Buildings - Historic Insane Asylum Architecture

Last week someone on the forum posted a link to a Time Magazine Story which mentioned Traverse City State Hospital. It gave me the idea to check for more stories concerning state hospitals from Time’s extensive 86 year archive. While there weren’t any amazing finds, there were a few interesting items…

Medicine in a Mad House (1934) – Tells the story of how a patient filled Danvers State Hospital‘s kitchen sugar cans with cockroach poison, killing another patient and making 13 others seriously ill.

Government Inspiration (1936) – This story about government sponsored art during the New Deal starts off with a description of a mural painted at Elgin State Hospital. I just thought it was interesting that the artists were instructed to “use only the softest shades of primary colors, to ‘avoid all exciting combinations.'”

Unhappy Anniversary (1952) – The sad story of Miss X, Topeka State Hospital’s oldest resident in 1952. She had been admitted to the hospital in 1882.

Reinforcement Therapy: Short Cut to Sanity? (1969) – Experiments in something called “Reinforcement Therapy” at Anna State Hospital in Illinois.

While doing a little digging around on Archive.org this evening I found a few Kirkbride- and asylum-related documents. First are two books about the Kirkbride family: A Brief History of the Kirkbride Family and Domestic Portraiture of Our Ancestors: Kirkbride. While they don’t tell us much about the good Doctor, both contain some interesting information about the Kirkbride family’s history.

There’s also a copy of On the Construction, Organization, and General Arrangements of Hospitals for the Insane available at Archive.org. If you use the ‘Flip Book’ feature, it’s much easier to read than with the clunky interface at Google Books. (more…)

Rummaging around online as I do all too often, I’ve come across a few famous names in connection with different Kirkbride hospitals—as patients I mean. I thought it would be interesting to start a list of them. Not only will it shed a little light on their personal stories, but it also shows mental illness doesn’t necessarily prevent one from being brilliant and/or functional. It also helps humanize the mostly anonymous group often referred to simply as “patients”. (more…)

In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been adding pages for Kirkbride buildings that no longer exist. If you go to the main buildings page and scroll down to the demolished Kirkbride list, you’ll see that some locations are now linked to pages for a particular asylum. So far I’ve added content for Columbus State Hospital (OH), Elgin State Hospital (IL), Mount Pleasant State Hospital (IA), Jackson State Hospital (MS), Nevada State Hospital (MO), and Rochester State Hospital (MN). I also put up a page for Saint Joseph State Hospital (MO) since what’s left of the building is now part of an active prison and I’m not likely to get photos of the place. (more…)