Today’s Restorative Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Addressing the American Psychiatric Association in 1933, President James May bemoaned the state of the profession. Few medical schools employed professors in the field of psychiatry. Mental illness, May said, was “a medical playground” in which neurologists, neurosurgeons, and psychiatrists competed with gynecologists and ophthalmologists in speculations on the causes of psychoses. From about 1930 until the introduction in 1954 of Thorazine, the first usable antipsychotic drug, the curative landscape resembled not a playground so much as the Wild West. Every few years, a new sheriff would ride into town, promoting a new wonder cure that eventually yielded to the next, short-lived fashion.
In the 1930s, for instance, a Trenton psychiatrist named Henry Cotton pulled patients’ teeth and removed their large intestines to cure mental illness, which he believed to be caused by “autointoxication.” For a while, fever was thought to be restorative for mental patients, especially for the stiff-gaited victims of general paresis, the physical and mental paralysis that accompanied the advanced stage of syphilis. Some hospitals kept malarial mosquitoes or diseased rats on hand to bite treatment subjects and induce fever. Others injected blood from fever victims into the paretics, who crowded the mental hospitals until the discovery of penicillin. For the ostensible purpose of boosting patients’ white blood cell count, some doctors injected horse blood into their subjects’ lumbar cavities, mixing the blood with spinal fluid. Then sleep therapy, or “prolonged narcosis,” came on the scene. In theory, a week-long, drug-induced nap would help restore a patient’s exhausted nervous system.
Some of Henry Cotton’s teeth-removing handiwork
Culled from: Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America’s Premier Mental Hospital
Crime Scene Du Jour!
Here’s another of those mysterious French crime scenes:
Affaire de la rue Erard No.8, Assassinat de Mme. Veuve Noyer
Culled from: Police Pictures
Andersonville Prisoner Diary Entry Du Jour!
I’m going to continue the diary of Andersonville prisoner Private George A. Hitchcock as a daily journal entry so we can “enjoy” his struggles over time (and I will update the archived version as I go so you can refresh your memory on his full story)… Here’s today’s entry:
June 17th. We found three men from Sherman’s army who have just come in, and one has a woolen blanket. We have gone in together, and, after looking several hours, secure sticks, and set up a shelter. Five of us get under, but find that we can only lie on our backs. There are now over 20,000 prisoners here, and the stench in every part of the camp is well-nigh unbearable. We are assured, however, that we shall get accustomed to that after a few days. Great numbers are dying every day, many from scurvy. At night drew rations of rice and sow-belly; the rice is half-booked, and only half a pint of it at that.
Culled from: Andersonville: Giving Up the Ghost