Morbid Fact Du Jour for September 7, 2015

Today’s Wet and Cold Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

The groundbreaking McLean Psychiatric Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts was founded in 1811. The hospital’s superintendent George Tuttle had this to say about the typical hospital “cures” of 1913: “There have been no striking changes during the year in methods of treatment. Emphasis is still laid on the superior advantage of out-of-door exercise, full feeding, and hydrotherapy for its tonic or soothing effect, as against sedative and hypnotic drugs, which practically are never prescribed.”

The hydrotherapy treatment that Tuttle mentions dates back to the eighteenth century. A famous French painting, Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat, depicts the emaciated revolutionary slumped over in his hydrotherapy bath at the Charenton Asylum, after being fatally stabbed by Charlotte Corday. You cannot tell by looking at the Bowditch and Wyman buildings at McLean that a half-century ago, the basements of these stately halls were given over to hydrotherapy baths just like those in the David painting, with their long tubs and sail-like canvas covers intended to prevent patients from drowning. (Some did anyway.) The so-called Scotch douches, showers in which the patients were surrounded by needle-like jets of water and then hosed down with ice-cold water from chrome-plated fire hoses – “medieval torture instrument[s],” one doctor called them – were dismantled in the 1950s.

Culled from: Gracefully Insane

This is what the stately buildings of McLean look like:

And this is the Scotch douche.  No, not the doctor!

Legend Du Jour!

Black dogs were nightwalkers feared throughout the British Isles. The dogs that preceded death were given various names – Black Shuck in East Anglia, Skriker and Trash-hound in Lancashire, Padfoot in Yorkshire – but all were of the same fell race. They appeared on dark nights in country lanes, loping easily along, eyes searching for solitary travelers who should have been safe at home. The people of Lancashire said that as such a dog approached, it swelled and grew until it was the size of a calf, and its saucer-wide eyes glowed red in the dark, fired by malice and hunger. Those who saw the dog knew – even though it passed them with little more than a sideways glance – that their time had come.

Culled from: The Enchanted World: Ghosts

I wish I knew who did that artwork so I could credit them because isn’t it awesome?  Which reminds me…

A Black Eyed Dog He Called At My Door…

And all this talk of black dogs reminds me of one of Nick Drake’s most chilling songs – one of his last songs recorded before committing suicide.