Locked Up

BRIAN BALOGH: Hey, Peter, I never thought that a story about leeches would turn into a feel good ending.

PETER ONUF: Well it’s an age of reform. This is the era of Women’s Rights, of temperance, of anti-slavery, you name it. We can make things better. And I think that you can listen to the story and you hear optimism. You hear the possibility that yes, these new institutions, maybe they are the solution. Maybe we can at least begin. Because, the idea of progress is not that you know everything now, but that one day you will.

BRIAN BALOGH: Yeah, speaking of progress, it goes down the tubes as far as the asylum is concerned, because by the end of the 19th century, these are large institutions. Two or three times the size. They’re warehousing people who are chronically ill. And while the institution was able to serve Jane Rider, it turns out that for every Jane Rider there were three or four more people who needed this kind of care and couldn’t get it.

PETER ONUF: Brian, I think this is a classic story that asylum keepers were too successful in the way they sold themselves to the larger public that they could do something, while they couldn’t really do much. But they always could get people into these asylums and out of society, out of families. Troublesome people could be warehoused. So the success in claiming to be able to deal with people with these mental problems led to this paradoxical situation where they couldn’t really deliver care because of the sheer numbers of people involved.

BRIAN BALOGH: Yeah, and the irony, Peter, is they did cure a lot of people, or a lot of people did you get better. Those people left the institution. So over time, you first had increasingly populations that were chronically ill. And then by the end of the 19th century, for very complicated reasons having to do with funding, you got more and more elderly people who pretty much went there to die.