1 Comments Posted by Ellis

Depending on the time period of the hospital and the situation of the patient, most people would spend their lives in an asylum. If the patient was considered "abandoned" the hospital would need to provide for the burial and most burials were done in somewhat secret circumstances. People with disorders - learning and otherwise - were considered subhuman and to be forgotten when their lives were over. For example; tunnels connecting hospital buildings were designed, early on, so that "civilized" people wouldn't exposed to brutish patients. In 1997, in the town next to where I go to school, they found - well unearthed actually - the long forgotten graves (which were only numbers) of the closed down psych hospital across from the towns middle school. The surveyors found the graves in the woods where they were hoping to expand the school's soccer fields. Patients were lost and locked away in life and hidden and forgotten in death.