Persuading Sanity: Magic Lantern Images and the Nineteenth‐Century Moral Treatment in America

Abstract

In first half of nineteenth century, while Western institutions reorganized themselves according to philosophies of Enlightenment, doctors, alienists, and reformers adopted new attitudes toward the mad.1 Abandoning chains and cages for mentally ill in jails and almshouses, they began creating therapeutic models of confinement. In 1820s, they founded asylum. Through surroundings and activities that uplifted spirits and rebuilt fiber, new superintendents of these new American institutions sought to drive out madness with good conduct. After 1839, another new American professional group, photographers, introduced photographic reproduction and better projection technologies that also incorporated ideas of Enlightenment. For these new specialists, mission expanded to all citizens equal opportunities for seeing images that would educate, morally uplift, and amuse. During 1840s, two Philadelphia photographers, William and Frederick Langenheim, worked to make photographic images more accessible, even to those confined to a new insane asylum in Philadelphia. Dr. Thomas Kirkbride, who had been appointed to head Pennsylvania Hospital for Insane in 1840, sought to combine his new ideas about moral of mental illness with his scientific interests in new image projection technology. In 1844, he asked his friends Langenheims to provide him with a magic lantern projector and their prepackaged illustrative slides. From then until he retired in 1883, Kirkbnde scheduled three magic lantern slide shows a week as part of his program of treatment at Pennsylvania Hospital for Insane (Layne 189). After 1850, Langenheims acquired nation's first patent for photographic collodion process, which replaced daguerreotype process and allowed better photographic detail and reproductions. Kirkbride also made available to his patients literally thousands of life-sized photographic images (Hamilton and Hargreaves 37). Kirkbride announced in 1844 that he expected magic lantern shows to amuse patients, and more to persuade them to shift their mental state from insanity to sanity. Specifically, he expected - and he never deviated from these expectations - shows to exert subtle control over patients' conduct and sense of responsibility. Framing shows so as to induce persuasive guilt, Kirkbride also said in his announcement that he hoped they would instill physical calmness, alter moods of sadness and depression to cheerfulness, enhance a sense of social position and cultivation, and evoke gratitude toward hospital's trouble and expense. Kirkbride's unusual strategy of using commercially manufactured images as tools for curing the mad brings together early history of American institutional psychiatry with early history of a photographic screening practice that became a model for early US cinema (Musser 16). Slides and papers documenting shows at Pennsylvania Hospital for Insane, which are housed at Philadelphia's Atwater Kent Museum, offer a unique chance to investigate how this new nineteenth-century screening practice was received within hopeful context of a new, sophisticated form of therapeutic confinement for middle- and upper-class mental patients. While public magic lantern screenings had been taking place since late 160Os, when use of photographic lantern show slides began, it was one of those of profound transformation m precmema history of screening practices, Charles Musser explains in The Emergence of Cinema (16). Musser argues that such moments allow for new possibilities, for an influx of new personnel, and for disruption and considerable discontinuity (16). This was year that the screen enters a period of flux, as also happened when motion picture inventors transferred images onto screens. The screening practice then became receptive to new influences from other cultural forms; it is at such times that its cultural interconnectedness becomes most apparent and perhaps important, Musser says (16). …