{"id":53,"date":"2008-03-20T00:40:55","date_gmt":"2008-03-20T04:40:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/weston-name-change-offensive"},"modified":"2008-07-04T11:40:01","modified_gmt":"2008-07-04T15:40:01","slug":"weston-name-change-offensive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/weston-name-change-offensive","title":{"rendered":"Weston Name Change Offensive?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Weston
\nNot too surprisingly there’s some noise being made over the recent rechristening of Weston State Hospital<\/a> as the “Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum”. The latter is of course the institution’s original name, and is definitely more attention grabbing than the less archaic “Weston State Hospital”. No doubt the new owners changed it to help market the place as a tourist destination.<\/p>\n

West Virginia Public Broadcasting tells the story in a recent podcast: “Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum” Offends Disability Advocates<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When speaking historically about these places, terms like “lunatic”, “insane” and “asylum” aren’t inappropriate. I can understand that people who spent time at Weston might not appreciate the place being known as a lunatic asylum, but I wouldn’t say that means the new owners should change the name back.<\/p>\n

“State hospital” isn’t an overly popular term either…although there’s something to be said about “lunatic asylum” stigmatizing individuals more so than “state hospital” does. I’d be interested to hear what other people think about this. Please comment if you have any thoughts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not too surprisingly there’s some noise being made over the recent rechristening of Weston State Hospital as the “Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum”. The latter is of course the institution’s original name, and is definitely more attention grabbing than the less archaic “Weston State Hospital”. No doubt the new owners changed it to help market the place […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,5,3],"tags":[132,133,25,39],"class_list":["post-53","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-news","category-preservation","tag-terminology","tag-trans-allegheny-lunatic-asylum","tag-weston","tag-weston-state-hospital"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":383,"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions\/383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}