Comments

Electric Chair

Are you sure it's for the laundry...?

Perhaps this was a hall connecting two wards.

Fly Catcher Film

Release Day

Since I was a little girl I've seen a wheel chair sitting in a garden rusting, it scares me but I like it. Its still there now don't you know...

One of Kirkbride's basic principles was that psychiatric hospital should have attractive, pleasant furnishings to facilitate patients' mental health and hopefully lead to their discharge from the facility. That's why he specified gardens, trees, large windows, wide hallways, high ceilings, careful selection of staff, and regular entertainment programs in the auditorium, among many other things. He recognized the problems of having too many patients in one hospital. He advised that patient bedrooms be as large as possible, to give patients "quiet and privacy...provided their dimensions are not so great as to lead to two patients being placed in the same room." State hospitals, in his opinion, "should be made good enough for the highest class of its citizens" because what is good enough for the most well-to-do patient "is none too good for the humblest of the unfortunates who are compelled to look to these institutions for custody and treatment." The attitude underlying all of his recommendations was that "the best hospital, best built, best arranged, and best managed, is always the most economical in the end." But then came far more patients, low salaries, lack of maintenance, little or no staff training...and we know the results. (the quotes are from a book I read recently but I can't remember its name)

that is usually an observation room,for patients on close supervision.
The majority of clients shared a dorm together sectioned off by lockers.

You know you're in bad shape when even your underwear isn't your own. :-)

Kurt: yep, it's a radio. Usually ones this big had record players built in, too.

A very trivial question that popped into my head when I saw this--in the old institutions built before electricity, what powered the clocks in the towers? Was there a winding mechanism in the attic?

What are those pipe-looking things near the bottom of the left-hand wall? Were there sinks or toilets on the opposite side in the past? Or maybe radiators? (but wouldn't radiators be on the wall or ceiling in a room with water?) And is that an electrical outlet under the sink on the right? Seems like safety must have been first on the mind of whoever installed that. Perhaps this room used to have another purpose and the outlet was disconnected when the sink was installed. As I think about it, I don't recall ever having been in a bathroom where the electrical outlets weren't above the fixtures.

I've been terrified of the dentist since I was about 8 years old. My regular dentist had a family emergency so his partner was covering his appointments for that day, one of which happened to be mine. I had badly chipped my two front teeth a couple of years earlier in a bike accident, and that icy cold air they used to use, to dry your teeth, I think, before they had the suction device they use today--caused severe fingernails-on-a-chalkboard type pain. My regular dentist knew this and was very careful. This dentist didn't, and when I started to cry he put his hand over my nose and mouth until I stopped crying because I couldn't breathe. I never did tell my parents.

I suppose the reason they tear down old buildings is partially due to a fascination with so-called "new and improved" structures, and also due to a focus on the financial bottom line. Asbestos abatement, lead paint removal, bringing vast plumbing, electrical and HVAC systems up to current code, retrofitting automatic sprinkler systems if the building doesn't already have one, universal design for accessibility, plus our changed ways of living/use of space and changed standards of privacy and patient rights...it probably is cheaper to tear it down and build from scratch. I wonder if they salvage what architectural elements they can before actual demolition. Many of these buildings have a quality of workmanship that cannot be duplicated today.

It's really hard to guess at the writer's meaning when all we have are the words. Just last night I watched a tv program about body language and how we really need to have facial expression, gestures, voice, and the words themselves if we are to make accurate judgments. When one of my children was in junior high, a classmate heard about something her boyfriend had said, and with typical teen-age girl hyperbole said, " I'm gonna just kill him!" An adult overheard the comment, took it way out of context, reported it, and the girl was suspended indefinitely. She was only allowed to return to school two weeks later, after having psychiatric and psychological evaluations to prove she was not dangerous. I know we have to be concerned about violence in schools and elsewhere, but we have to make sure we're paying attention to the right signs, and that those signs really do mean what we think they mean. Perhaps the writer of this note was merely quoting a song s/he liked.