Comments

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.

THIS IS AWSOME,
sadistic in an Admin sort of way

everything about this photographer's thought processes and artist intuition is awsome!

awsome! that's it

incendiary

i wonder how many patients were able to sneak up there and have a smoke

motts, you have done it again

i wonder if they had anything planned durring that month, and if it was of dreadful interest

i get the feeling that is the doorway to certain doom

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.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!! rememering the first time i walked up these stairs

I was paid to go up and over there. let me tell u a thing or to bout being scared shitless. It is about 9 feet , but if u were up there shaking, it was ice cold, remembering your in an asylum, then about 20 pigeons come fling at you and u fell, I think you would have a different opinion on how much 9 feet is.

Just if was easy getting it out...