Madness and Healing in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

One morning in October 1849, a former patient at the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane returned surreptitiously to the asylum from which he had twice escaped in the previous year. Wiley Williams had been an uncooperative patient from the beginning, and although he had defeated his relatives' attempts to confine him, he had formed a settled hatred of the hospital's superintendent, Thomas Story Kirkbride. He climbed a tree near the hospital's main buildings and attracted the attention of Kirkbride's young son, Joseph. The boy dutifully notified his father that there was a man up a tree, and when the superintendent went to investigate, Wiley Williams shot him in the head. Thomas Story Kirkbride wore stiff hats and must have had a hard head: the ball lodged between his skull and his scalp and caused only a superficial wound. Kirkbride was the most distinguished American asylum superintendent of the mid-nineteenth century, and the attempt on his life may serve as an allegory. Ever since the publication of Michel Foucault's Histoire de la folie in 1961, revisionist historians have been taking aim at the treatment movement that Kirkbride championed.1 The Philadelphia Hospital was the showpiece of moral treatment in America, the equivalent of the York Retreat in England and Philip Pinel's asylum practice in France. Kirkbride was one of the leading figures, if not the leading one, among American asylum superintendents and the author of the most influential work on asylum architecture in the period. The first round shot in Kirkbride's direction by a historian was David Rothman's The Discovery of the Asylum (1971); he and his American and English counterparts have since been blasted by Andrew Scull, Richard Fox, and a host of less notable scholars.2 Like Williams, these irregulars are outraged at what they take to be the hypocrisy of men like Kirkbride and the system that they advocated. They believe that in spite of the noble sentiments that the mid-nineteenth-century reformers used to describe their methods,