MFDJ 03/29/24: Hydrotherapy

Today’s Kinder, Gentler Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

A kinder, gentler form of therapy administered at McLean Mental Hospital was the various water treatments that had been administered to mental patients since the end of the eighteenth century. The 1922 McLean nurses’ manual lists no fewer than seventeen different hydrotherapy regimens, from the foot bath to the shampoo. Most are categorized as “tonic baths” and administered in the “hydriatic suite” in the basement of the women’s gymnasium. Here are a few of the treatments and partial list of the illnesses they were supposed to assuage:

Hot Air Bath:  Alcoholism, manic depression, dementia praecox (senility)

Electric Light Bath: Same

Vapor Bath: Same

Salt Glow (an eight- to twelve-minute rubdown with salt crystals): Huntington’s chorea, involution melancholia, multiple sclerosis

Fomentation (application of moist heat using a thirty-inch-square piece of white woolen flannel):  Same, plus cerebral syphilis, paralysis agitans, etc.

Revulsive Sitz Bath (“As patient arises from the bath, a pail of cold water, 80 deg., is splashed upon the hips.”): Neuralgia

Pail Douche (“Have water at three temperatures in pails holding several gallons. Dash the contents of each pail over the patient in quick succession.”): Good tonic treatment

Wet Mitt Friction (loofah or white mohair): “Invaluable in inaugurating hydrotherapy in the psychoneuroses”

Neptune Girdle (apparently a variant of the cold wet sheet pack, placed around a woman’s waist): “Employed extensively in the treatment of the psychoneuroses”

One of the most common hydrotherapies was wrapping the patients in cold (forty-eight to fifty-six degrees Fahrenheit), wet sheets. These so-called packs were used to pacify agitated patients up through the 1970s. In 1922, the packs’ effect was divided into action (“sensation of chilliness… cooling of the skin… shivering”) and thermic reaction (“chilliness disappears… skin becomes warm… muscular relaxation occurs”). Hypothermia was of course a risk: “If there is any unusual paleness of the face, blueness of the hips or shivering, the patient… should be warmed by the application of hot water bags to his sides and feet. He should also be given a hot stimulating drink. (A teaspoonful of whiskey in hot water is considered good because whiskey dilates the blood vessels in the skin.)”

Another ubiquitous remedy was the “continuous bath.” According to the nurses’ manual, the prolonged bath could be “administered for hours, days, weeks or months.” “In some hospitals [and this is a tip-off that we are not speaking about McLean], it is customary to keep the patients in the tubs 18 hours daily and some very disturbed patients are kept in the baths without removal for periods of 2 or 3 weeks.”

Director Franklin Wood’s desk notebook of course codified every last concern about the continuous baths, from the proper temperature (ninety-four degrees Fahrenheit) to the possible dangers: “1. Heat prostration; 2. Chilling; 3. Scalding; 4. Drowning; 5. Convulsions.” The following instruction would indicate that some patients did spend day-long cycles in the baths: “If a patient is very noisy, restless, or flushed, or if the pulse rate is 88 or more rapid, supply an ice collar. Sponge the face of each patient with cold water once or twice during the bath. Omit during sleep.”


Patients undergoing hydrotherapy

Culled from: Gracefully Insane

 

Vintage Crime Victim Du Jour!

Photographer: T. R. Thompson, 05-15-1934.
Assault victim. Case information unavailable.

Culled from: Scene of the Crime: Photographs from the LAPD Archive

Andersonville Prisoner Diary Entry Du Jour!

This is the continuation of the 1864 diary of Andersonville prisoner Private George A. Hitchcock (see the archived version for all entries up until now).

Here’s today’s entry:

November 24th. Milder than yesterday. Beef and salt were issued to us. Citizens have been bringing in food and clothes all day but I am not smart enough to get any. A lot of prisoners went south on the Florida road; the sick were also taken away, and the rest of us were allowed to get wood from the lumber-yard, with which we keep more comfortable at night.

Culled from: Andersonville: Giving Up the Ghost

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