Today’s Dutiful Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Northern Michigan Asylum
Attendant Floor Duties – 1886
- Daily sweep and mop the floor of your ward; dust the patients’ furniture and window sills.
- Maintain an even temperature in your ward by bringing in a scuttle of coal for the day’s business.
- Light is important to observe the patients’ condition. Therefore, each day fill kerosene lamps, clean chimneys, and trim wicks. Wash the windows once a week.
- The nurse’s notes are important in aiding the physician’s work. Make your pens carefully; you may whittle nibs to your taste.
- Each nurse on day duty will report every day at 7 A.M. and leave at 8 P.M. except on the Sabbath, on which day you will be off from noon to 2 P.M.
- Graduate nurses in good standing with the Director of Nurses will be given an evening off for courting purposes, or two evenings a week if you go regularly to church.
- Each nurse should lay aside from each payday a goodly sum of her earnings for her benefits during her declining years so that she will not become a burden. For example, if you earn $30 a month, you should set aside $15.
- Any nurse who smokes, uses liquor in any form, gets her hair done at a beauty salon, or frequents dance halls will give the Director of Nurses good reason to suspect her worth, intentions and integrity.
- The nurse who performs her labors and serves her patients and doctors without fault for five years will be given an increase of five cents a day, providing there are no hospital debts outstanding.
Nursing guidelines from 1886, Traverse City Regional Psychiatric Hospital.
Eunice and Hattie Waslh, nurse attendants, North Michigan Asylum, circa 1886.
Sisters Eunice and Hattie Walsh were both hired as attendants in 1885 to work oin the brand-new Northern Michigan Asylum. Eunice (left), who had prior nursing experience, was paid $22 per month. Hattie, a nurse trainee, was paid $15 a month. Both sisters moved to the asylum campus in 1892 to live in employee housing an resided there for twenty years, until records of their employment ended in 1912. At that time, the sisters were earning $31 per month.
Culled from: Angels in the Architecture: A Photographic Elegy to an American Asylum
Garretdom
Here’s a horrible way to die from the February 15, 1872 issue of the Mower County Transcript, Austin:
The Shakopee Mirror reports the death of a child three years old, caused by the bursting of a mince pie, which his mother was conveying from the oven. The pie being surcharged with steam – having no vent in the crust – exploded, throwing a considerable quantity of the scalding contents about the little unfortunate’s face and neck, burning it so badly as to throw it into convulsions resulting in death.
Culled from: Coffee Made Her Insane