"A Refuge of Cure or of Care": The Sensory Dimensions of Confinement at the Worcester State Hospital for the Insane

Summary

American asylum medicine, the precursor to psychiatry, was predicated on an environmental approach to the treatment of mental illness: specifically, upon the creation of a curative environment that would rigorously organize patients’ exposure to sensory stimuli. This paper combines documentary records, evidence from surviving architecture, and geospatial renderings of the landscape in order to access those stimuli – consisting of the sights, sounds, smells, and tactile qualities of the natural and built environments – as they were refracted through the ideological and physical structures of the asylum, for the purpose of reconstructing the lived experience of insanity in the first and longest-running state hospital in the United States: the Worcester State Hospital in Massachusetts. In doing so, this paper will demonstrate how experiences of illness within a total institution are formed in the interface between individual historical agents and their environment, through the spaces, materials, and activities of everyday life.  

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions) 2018   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2018

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 355