Asylum on the Hill
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Asylum on the Hill is the story of a great American experiment in psychiatry, a revolution in care for those with mental illness, as seen through the example of the Athens Lunatic Asylum. Built in southeast Ohio after the Civil War, the asylum embodied the nineteenth-century “gold standard” specifications of moral treatment. Stories of patients and their families, politicians, caregivers, and community illustrate how a village in the coalfields of the Hocking River valley responded to a national movement to provide compassionate care based on a curative landscape, exposure to the arts, outdoor exercise, useful occupation, and personal attention from a physician. Katherine Ziff’s compelling presentation of America’s nineteenth-century asylum movement shows how the Athens Lunatic Asylum accommodated political, economic, community, family, and individual needs and left an architectural legacy that has been uniquely renovated and repurposed. Incorporating rare photos, letters, maps, and records, Asylum on the Hill is a fascinating glimpse into psychiatric history.
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Praise for Asylum on the Hill
“This well-written, accurately researched historical work tells the story of the Athens Lunatic Asylum. . . . This is a work that brings the reader inside the life and times of patient care in Ohio. Asylum on the Hill is highly readable, enlightening, and for those who currently work in the field of psychiatry, the story is familiar and somewhat poignant. . . . Highly recommended.”
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As a result of this economic disaster, when the asylum at Athens opened in 1874 many of its first patients were men and women depressed and suicidal about business failure and highly anxious with fears of poverty and want.
The work to create the Athens Lunatic Asylum began three years after the end of the Civil War, and hopes were high for this new institution. Its relatively small size, compared to its contemporary asylums in America and Europe, was considered a favorable point. “Large as it really is,” wrote Dr. Richard Gundry (superintendent of the Southern Asylum at Cincinnati) of its room for 570 patients, “it is eclipsed by several in extent and capacity. In New York, the asylum at Utica, with its 800 patients; the New York city asylum, with its 1400 patients; in France La Salpetriere, with its 1400 patients. . . . [I]n England, Colney Hatch or Hanwell, each having more than 1000 inmates.”43 The services of Dr. Gundry had been secured by the Athens asylum trustees for advice and assistance in completing the construction of the Athens facility. He continued in his 1872 report to the newly formed Board of Trustees of the Athens Lunatic Asylum to stress the Kirkbride model’s design preference for smaller asylums and the superiority of the asylum at Athens in this regard: “And indeed, while the enormous size of such institutions may be defended on the ground of economy in administration . . . it must be always borne in mind that the true interests of the insane would be better served by smaller institutions and more of them. . . . I repeat that few if any institutions, within my knowledge, will surpass this in the essential and fundamental requirements of all such buildings—the proportion of space, light and air to each patient.”44
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