Today’s Brutal and Sanguinary Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
The Whipping Act was added to the English statute book during the reign of Henry XVIII in 1530. It was designed specifically to put down vagrancy, and it provided that any vagrant detected in the act should be haled to the nearest town possessing a market-place “and there tied to the end of a cart naked, and beaten with whips throughout each market town, or other place, till the body shall be bloody by reason of such whipping.” This brutal and sanguinary act remained in force for some fifty years. Then certain modifications were made. The cart-tail business was largely discontinued; the nudity clause was abandoned. Thenceforth the culprit was allowed to wear some clothing, at any rate, and was tied to a post while the whipping was performed. It was at this time that whipping-posts were erected in pretty nearly all the towns and villages throughout England, Their number and popularity are indicated by the lines of the poet John Taylor:
In London, and within a mile, I ween,
There are jails or prisons full eighteen,
And sixty whipping-posts and stocks and cages.
Culled from: The History of Corporal Punishment
Here’s a surviving 18th century whipping post in the English town of Poulton-le-Flyde.
Ghastly!
This is a photograph by Arne Svenson (2001) of two sagital sections of the head, prepared for the Mütter Museum by Dr. Joseph P. Tunis (1866-1936), 1910. Culled from: Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia by Gretchen Worden. You know I would kill to photograph this collection. Sigh…
Wretched Recommendations!
For those of us who adore old Kirkbride asylum architecture, Carolyn recommends the book Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals by Christopher Payne. I’ve had my eye on this one for awhile. Here’s the blurb from Amazon:
“For more than half the nation’s history, vast mental hospitals were a prominent feature of the American landscape. From the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, over 250 institutions for the insane were built throughout the United States; by 1948, they housed more than a half million patients. The blueprint for these hospitals was set by Pennsylvania hospital superintendant Thomas Story Kirkbride: a central administration building flanked symmetrically by pavilions and surrounded by lavish grounds with pastoral vistas. Kirkbride and others believed that well-designed buildings and grounds, a peaceful environment, a regimen of fresh air, and places for work, exercise, and cultural activities would heal mental illness. But in the second half of the twentieth century, after the introduction of psychotropic drugs and policy shifts toward community-based care, patient populations declined dramatically, leaving many of these beautiful, massive buildings–and the patients who lived in them–neglected and abandoned.
“Architect and photographer Christopher Payne spent six years documenting the decay of state mental hospitals like these, visiting seventy institutions in thirty states. Through his lens we see splendid, palatial exteriors (some designed by such prominent architects as H. H. Richardson and Samuel Sloan) and crumbling interiors–chairs stacked against walls with peeling paint in a grand hallway; brightly colored toothbrushes still hanging on a rack; stacks of suitcases, never packed for the trip home. Accompanying Payne’s striking and powerful photographs is an essay by Oliver Sacks (who described his own experience working at a state mental hospital in his book Awakenings). Sacks pays tribute to Payne’s photographs and to the lives once lived in these places, ‘where one could be both mad and safe.'”
More books about the history of mental illness can be seen at the Library Eclectica’s 30Insanity aisle.