There’s a new pictorial history of Spring Grove State Hospital entitled… Spring Grove State Hospital
. It’s was compiled by David Helsel, M.D. and Trevor Blank. (Dr. Helsel is the superintendent of Spring Grove Hospital Center.)
The book was published as part of the Images of America series. Images of America books are pretty consistently good quality resources for historical images and history.
I haven’t seen the book myself yet, but I’m told that several images of the Spring Grove Kirkbride building are included. If the images are anything like those on the hospital web site’s virtual tour of the old Kirkbride, I’m sure they’re worth seeing, especially in print.
I’ve been trying to add to the list of Kirkbride buildings and remembered a couple asylums mentioned in America’s Care of the Mentally Ill. In the book, there’s a nice bird’s eye view of an asylum called Saint Vincent’s in Saint Louis, Missouri. After a little searching I was able to find the address and confirm that it was a Kirkbride. In the aerial photo above, you can see the building still stands. It’s been converted to a residential complex called Castle Park Apartments and will probably be around for a good long time. That was a nice surprise. It’s hard to believe there aren’t any other photos of this castle-like Kirkbride online. It’s pretty impressive, if a little over the top in style. (more…)
For those of you in New England: Carla Yanni, author of The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States, will be giving a lecture at the Lamar Soutter Library in Worcester, Massachusetts on March 12, 5:00PM-7:00PM. The lecture is open to the public. Dr. Yanni will also be signing her book, which is a really good read if you’re at all interested in asylum history.
The book is generously illustrated with old photos, drawings, and architectural plans. It also engagingly describes the familiar arc of the asylum system’s rise and fall, while revealing a few nuggets of data not readily available elsewhere. Most importantly though, the peculiar relationship between architecture and early mental healthcare is analyzed and presented here much more thoroughly than in most other books on asylum history. You really get a strong sense of why Dr. Kirkbride and his peers believed in the power of their buildings.
In connection with a broader overview of American asylums, Dr. Yanni also presents closer studies of the Kirkbride asylums at Trenton, New Jersey; Tuscaloosa, Alabama; Buffalo, New York; Poughkeepsie, New York; Morristown, New Jersey; and Saint Elizabeths in Washington, DC. There are also a couple of intriguing, first-hand accounts from nineteenth-century asylum patients. It’s definitely worth getting your hands on a copy.
