Sunday, January 5, 2020: 1:50 PM
Riverside Ballroom (Sheraton New York)
Courtney Lacy, Southern Methodist University
As United States populations increased in the first half of the nineteenth century, Americans rethought care for the mentally ill. Religious reformers believed humans could alleviate suffering and establish a kingdom of God on earth. These optimistic impulses inspired physicians to seek cures for once seemingly hopeless insane patients. Reformers built institutions to accommodate the insane. The architects modeled these buildings after the potentially cured bodies of the very patients who would live inside them. Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride led the charge toward a design to improve recovery rates. His method, the Kirkbride Plan, included architecture but also advocated for Moral Treatment of patients which included a more humane approach for patients.
Physicians believed that bad behavior manifested in a disordered body and mind. Physicians saw women as exceptionally vulnerable to bodily disorder and therefore, this paper primarily focuses on manipulation of women’s bodies. Doctors felt that the way to recuperate an insane person involved ordering her physical existence in intentionally constructed buildings. The grounds and the buildings reflected how the appearance of the patient should become over time. If an individual were to gain an orderly body on the outside, her insides would undoubtedly reflect the same purity and efficiency. This modeled building would be based on the ideal person.
Building upon the scholarship of Nancy Tomes (1984) and Carla Yanni (2007) who researched architecture and nineteenth-century medicine but did not write about the religious and bodily influences upon patients, this paper analyzes the blueprints of the past from Kirkbride asylums in the Midwest. Patients’ bodies serve as lenses into how designers of these buildings used the architecture that housed the insane as a way to not only mold them into ideal citizens but also to strip away any ecstatic religious or sexual impulses they harbored upon entering.
