Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
Names often change to keep up with the times. That is certainly true for the Brattleboro Retreat. For the first six decades of its existence, the psychiatric hospital and addictions treatment center was named the Vermont Asylum for the Insane, a name that hasn’t aged well.
Over time, once-innocuous words can become loaded, offensive even. Retreat officials would never consider restoring the original name, but they can be proud of the Retreat’s original mission. Despite its now coarse-sounding name, the Vermont Asylum for the Insane was founded in the 1830s as an antidote to the harsh treatment of mental illness that was then common.
During Vermont’s early days, psychiatric care was largely left in the hands of amateurs. While creating Vermont’s first laws in 1779, the state Legislature approved “An Act for relieving and ordering Idiots; impotent, distracted and idle Persons.” The law left it up to families to care for relatives suffering from mental illness or developmental issues. If the family was too poor, it was up to the local selectboard to arrange care. The board would solicit bids and pay the low bidder, who agreed to care for the patient.
Families and low bidders coped the best they could in trying to treat ailments they knew little about. When not treated in a home, people with mental illness were shipped to Connecticut to the Hartford Retreat for the Insane, since Vermont had no such facility at the time.
The Legislature required local officials to report any people in town who were considered mentally “defective” or “deficient,” as well as the suspected cause of the condition, how long the victims had been in this condition, how they had been treated and the financial ability of their families to care for them.
The state still has the original reports in its archives. Reading through them gives a glimpse of how people with mental illness were viewed and treated. In 1835, the Shaftsbury town clerk reported that an Ebenezer Martin Jr., then 35 or 40 years old, had been considered insane for at least 15 years. In his notes, the clerk wrote: “(Martin) has been confined at several times, is now at liberty to be about the premises on farm of his brother. The cause as far as known was a disappointment in a contemplated matrimonial connexion and loss by sudden death of a brother.”
Of the brokenhearted Martin, the clerk continued, “some have expressed an opinion that more humane treatment from his friends would be a benefit to him. The family have fear of his assaulting them for which cause he has heretofore been confined by a chain fast to floor and … about his ankle.”
Two sisters from Monkton show up in the 1835 report by that town’s clerk. The older one, then 45, “for some four or five months past has been crazy to a frenzy,” so she was chained up, the clerk reported. The other, age 40, had seemed occasionally troubled about 10 years earlier, “but for eight years past her insanity has been uniform and unreturned by the light of reason.”
The horrifying image of Vermonters chained in their bedrooms is rivaled by descriptions of therapy in the hands of the era’s doctors. When a patient failed to respond to regular bloodletting and purging, doctors would administer the “bath of surprise.” The treatment is described in Dr. James Brown’s “The Elements of Medicine,” a standard medical text of the time. Brown recommending that the patient be dunked “in water as cold as possible and kept under, covered all over, for a long time, till he is near killed.” If that failed, doctors would dose the patient with massive amounts of opium. Days later, when patient regained consciousness, doctors hoped that he or she would also have regained their senses.
The “bath of surprise” was an extreme measure that sometimes ended tragically. The heartbreaking outcome of one such treatment may have sparked the founding of the Vermont Asylum for the Insane in 1834.
Richard Whitney was a prominent lawyer in Windsor, who worked for state government; his job was roughly akin to today’s position of secretary of state. In 1806, Whitney suffered some sort of mental breakdown and was deemed insane. A group of area physicians – including a Dr. Perley Marsh – treated Whitney with the bath of surprise. When the dunking did no good, they administered a huge dose of opium, which killed him.
Whitney’s death seems to have deeply affected Dr. Marsh’s wife, Anna, who inherited the doctor’s estate when he died the following year. When Anna herself died 28 years later, she left $10,000 for the creation of an institute for the humane treatment of insanity. The trustees of her estate purchased a large house and surrounding fields in Brattleboro and opened the Vermont Asylum for the Insane, which was one of the first 10 psychiatric hospitals in the country.
Dr. William Rockwell, who had been superintendent at the Hartford Retreat, became director of the Vermont Asylum. Rockwell used a therapy called “moral treatment” in Brattleboro, which involved treating the patients by encouraging discipline. Patients were also expected to work. It was part of Rockwell’s belief that to improve their minds, patients should be encouraged to exercise their bodies. Accordingly, he kept patients active, working in the fields and around the institute. Thus, “their former habits and associations will be awakened, the mind and body will be invigorated, and reason will often be restored,” he wrote.
Rockwell meant his therapy to be caring. As he explained it, “the discipline is truly parental. As soon as the patients are in a proper condition, they eat at our table, are received into our parlor, join with us in our family worship, go with us to church–in a word, are members of our family.”
But in the early days, the treatment was sometimes misapplied, with occasionally tragic consequences. In his book “A Tale of New England,” historian Robert Shalhope follows the life of Bennington farmer Hiram Harwood. In 1837, when Harwood became obsessed with the fear he was dying, his friends had him admitted to the newly founded institution. Rockwell diagnosed Harwood as suffering from a pathological preoccupation caused by “hypochondria.”
Rockwell viewed the root of Harwood’s troubles as physical, as was commonly believed in the day. To restore balance to Harwood’s body and mind, Rockwell treated him with laxatives and strong narcotics. What he didn’t diagnose or treat was Harwood’s depression. As Shalhope writes, “It was not unusual, then, at the end of the day, for Rockwell to respond to a declaration by Hiram that he ‘thought he should not live the day out’ with the simple statement ‘His bowels are more regular.’”
Four and a half months after he was admitted, Hiram Harwood was discharged. Rockwell recorded his condition as “improved.” This, despite Harwood’s recent ravings that tobacco in his hat would kill him and that he had almost died from eating bread. “Apparently, however,” Shalhope writes, “Hiram’s bowels must have been regular and his appetite good …”
Harwood spent the next year drifting around his farm, muttering about his impending death. One day, when he did not return for the midday dinner, his friends searched the farm for him. They found him hanging in the barn. He had brought the death he had so long feared.
Fortunately, since Dr. Rockwell’s day, psychological understanding has greatly improved and psychiatric treatments have been changed, along with the names of certain institutions.