77 Comments Posted by jane

Boy I am glad I wasn't commited back then

yeah, well, the current alternatives aren't great either. It sucks to be homeless and hungry and out in the cold too. And I'm sure the huge percentage of mentally ill and "developmentally challenged" folks who are housed in prisons these days might actually prefer being in a place like this. At least they had "three hots and and a cot" and while they might have had to deal with the cruelties of some of the staff, at least they weren't being preyed upon by a prison full of criminals and predators. To find a place like this so overwhelmingly creepy, I guess you have to believe that we stand on some moral high ground now and that things like this belong safely in the past. In a lot of ways, things are worse now.

actually, in that 1930's to 1970's time frame, most women gave birth under general anethesia. Mrs. Smith would've had no clue who was there or what happened until she woke up hours later.

passing the emesis basin

wow, a giant parcheesi board!

Motts, have you ever explored the old Rocky Springs Amusement Park in Lancaster, PA? Most of it has been torn down for a retirement community, but parts were still standing a few years ago when I checked into it.

Iron lung may not be PC, but it saved a lot of lives.

truly, I'm glad you all find this disturbing. It means that because of the vaccine, you aren't familiar with all this. It wasn't at all uncommon when I was a kid to see people on crutches who'd had polio as kids. It isn't so common now, thank God. Although it is only beaten back, not gone. AOL news reported five cases among the Amish in Minnesota last week.

I guess they would have had to wear diapers or be catheterized. Maybe those holes in the side were for tending to those needs. I wonder if the patient could breathe while those holes were open? That would have been truly terrifying if you stopped breathing every time they tended to your bodily functions

I hate to say it, but it wouldn't matter if you did want to turn over. If you had polio badly enough to need one of these, the rest of your body was paralyzed too.

I don't think most people were in these for thirty years. If I'm not mistaken, most folks did improve over time and regained some use of their bodies. I think some even made pretty complete recoveries. I don't know if I am allowed to mention the name of an author here, but a certain writer of racing mysteries told in his autobiography of how his wife had polio when she was pregnant with their first child. She was in an iron lung through most of the pregnancy, but she recovered completely and the child was perfectly fine.

gee lynne, I wish I'd known about this site back in July so I could have posted this when you might have actually seen it, but beautifully well said. I have been savoring this site, looking at it every night for over a week now. The more I read the comments, the more I was thinking exactly what you just said so well. If all we come away with is titillation and horror, we haven't learned very much. I taught for three years in a home for troubled (mentally ill) youths and I learned that this problem is never as simple as it seems. It is only too easy to tar all mental health workers with the same brush, but most are hard working decent people trying to make the best of a bad situation. Lets not forget in all this, that the patients are mentally ill, which means that their brains work in bizarre and disfunctional ways. Some of them aren't safe in the outside world, by which I mean that they will hurt themselves or be hurt by someone else. Some are too trusting, making them easy marks for thugs and criminals. Some have no grasp of reality. And some are predators in their own right. So while some can survive in the outside world with the help of medications, some left these hospitals only to be homeless, hungry and cold. Others left only to commit a crime and are now in prisons where they are getting abuse the likes of which was unheard of in these hospitals. Sometimes I think that closing these old institutions was a truly unkind thing to do to the patients. They were not equipped to go out into the world and make a living. Thats why they were in the hospital in the first place.

its also the right height to have been hit but hundreds of gurneys, carts, wheel chairs and mop buckets pushed by harried orderlys and staff.

Your site has really piqued my curiousity Motts. I have spent a happy week purusing your site and doing research on other sites. I now know who Kirkbride was, what he did for mental health and what he had to do with these vastly different buildings. I did some digging and figured out where this facility is. I'll respect your wish to leave it nameless. The cool thing is knowing that we can also imagine the acitivity going on in these hallways in the future. It will apparently soon be converted to a hotel. If I have the right facility, (and I have been able to match other photographs to yours), they are going to try to save the whole building, as well as construct townhouses and a marina around it. They have a real job ahead of them. I can't imagine how they will safely get all those hanging floors down without damaging the masonry walls or remove all the lead paint, but that is apparently the plan. I wish them well.

anyone know anything about the old Mt Wilson Hospital (another branch of the Maryland Tuberculosis Hospital, located in the Pikeville/Garrison area) I worked on the grounds after it closed and before it was turned into a retirement home, but I never saw the inside or learned much about its history.

what is even cooler is that tb isn't common anymore and most of us don't know what most of this stuff is or was used for. Thank God for penicillin and tb testing for people and cattle. No longer do we have to worry about our kid's milk carrying a deadly pathogen or the person next to us coughing on us and putting us in a place like this one.