I would like to offer a sincere thanks to colleagues and friends who offered advice and support during the writing of this book. I am particularly indebted to Bob Hendersen, Joe Verschaeve, Michael and Mary Louise Ott, Jennifer Stewart, and Erika King and Robert Beasecker.
The librarians at Grand Valley State University are owed a special thanks for hunting down and retrieving often obscure reference material, and then never raising an eyebrow about the sometimes, shall we say, “unsettling” content.
I learned so much from my visits to the Het Dolhuys, the national museum of psychiatry, in Haarlem, Netherlands, and to the Medicinsk Museion in Copenhagen, Denmark, which has an interesting exhibit on therapeutic interventions used in the country’s asylums. The Glore Psychiatric Museum in St. Joseph, Missouri, was a wonderful place to spend a long, rainy afternoon, and I want to thank Sarah Elder, curator of collections, for allowing me to take photographs and publish them in this book.