December 1880
Metropolitan Hotel, New York City
The Department of Public Charities and Correction was always in over its head. In 1880, the year of the Senate investigation, 8.4 percent of the entire population of New York City had come under its care (although perhaps a little less, given that some of the inmates were repeats). Other states were escalating the crisis, the commissioners complained, by sending their blind, lunatic, and infirm poor to New York in order to “rid themselves of pauper burdens.” The Asylum superintendent was forced to concede that due to the overwhelming numbers, “proper classification is unattainable at present,” essentially making the whole concept of moral treatment an impossible dream. While they would not have relished defending themselves against the perception that they were the source of the problem, perhaps like Moses Ranney all those years ago, the managers of the Asylum hoped that all this attention would finally lead to change.
The special committee was made up of three senators: William B. Woodin, a Republican and the chairman of the committee; Charles A. Fowler, a Democrat; and Edmund L. Pitts, a Republican. They met for the first time to hear from witnesses on Wednesday, December 1, in Parlor No. 125 at the Metropolitan Hotel at Broadway and Prince Street. Issues that had been raised many times before were revisited, like overcrowding, the use of restraints, a shortage of attendants, and the fact that the commissioners were not medical men and the superintendents didn’t have backgrounds in caring for the insane. They heard from doctors, nurses, experts in the study of insanity, commissioners, superintendents, ex-superintendents, clergy, and members of the State Board of Charities. But they didn’t elicit testimony from a single patient.
The first witness sworn in was Dr. Edward C. Spitzka, a twenty-eight-year-old alienist (the nineteenth-century term for psychologists and psychiatrists) whose specialty was “diseases of the mental and nervous system” and who, according to later testimony from Dr. Alexander Macdonald, had been rejected by no less than five asylums where he’d applied for a position. Spitzka, a member of the American Neurological Society (who would go on to become their president), would disprove this claim.
Perhaps the real reason for Macdonald’s animosity towards Spitzka was that the year before, the American Neurological Society had submitted a petition to the state legislature outlining asylum abuses, and that part of the problem was that superintendents and their assistants were not keeping up with the times. They are “not versed in the new anatomy and physiology of the nervous system,” and “are not believed to be skilled in the modern methods of diagnosis and post-mortem examination.” Macdonald would later tell a reporter that Spitzka and the Society were enemies of all “superintendents of insane asylums they could not control.”
According to Robert Whitaker in his book Mad in America, neurologists like Edward Spitzka “prided themselves on being men of hard science” and saw the “asylum doctors as a pathetic lot—old, old-fashioned, and hopelessly influenced by their Christian beliefs.” The Society’s petition maintained that doctors in the asylums wasted time writing “useless histories of cases” and “talking by the hour with friends of patients.”
Spitzka did a very clever thing. When asked to state what he knew about abuses in the management of asylums he simply read from one of the hospital books that was used to record accidents. His selection of brief but striking entries revealed more of a war zone than a refuge, making it very clear how someone like Maria Ottmer could end up murdered by a patient wielding a chamber pot:
August 21, Rose McLaughlin, received yesterday from Hall 5, made a furious attack on the nurses last evening and it became necessary to place her in restraint; has received several severe bruises on her left shoulder and arm, and large discolored patches and several scratches on her right shoulder.
September 25, Charlotte Marsh was attacked suddenly and without provocation this morning by Mary Sullivan; received a blow on the head inflicting a severe wound.
December 21, Maria Ottmer, considerably emaciated; is very filthy in her habits; there are several discolored spots on the body which were present the day before.
December 27, Maria Ottmer received a severe beating from Sarah Way; her eyes are much swollen and discolored and there are several scratches on her forehead.
September 1, Anna McKenna was attacked and beaten by Ann Scott, receiving several severe bruises on her body.
October 8, Mary Stuart became violent this morning about 5:30; attacked the nurse with a heavy wooden pail.
October 12, while Mary Stuart was in a paroxysm of excitement, a few days ago, she struck Emma Limburger with a pail.
October 13, Augusta Klink, became excited yesterday evening and fell forward to the floor, dragging with her the bench to which she had been strapped by a belt owing to her destructiveness; she struck her head, inflicting a very severe bruise, which has an extensive swelling and discoloration about her eye.
When he got to the entry noting that Maria Ottmer had not been transferred to the hospital after having been attacked, he read a selection of other sick or injured patients who were never sent to the hospital:
September 27, Johanna Hanser has a high, fever, her pulse being very rapid; complained of pains and vomited; she was not transferred to the hospital until the next day, as she was violent, and the physician hoped she would recover.
October 1, Adelaide Hahn has a high fever; she was not transferred to the hospital, as she might injure other patients. The witness added that this patient was kept continually in restraint.
October 3, Clara Krans, a patient who had been struck in the Retreat on September 28, and had not been transferred to the hospital then, very much exhausted and seems to be growing weaker. She has several bruises, probably caused by falling from her bed; was transferred to hospital next day, and then died.
A doctor who’d been present at the inquest into Maria Ottmer’s death testified that Dr. Leonard Pitkin’s testimony (the doctor who refused to move Maria to the hospital) “would have disgraced a first-class horse medical student in his utter ignorance of the system.” Everything about the management of asylums had to be overhauled, he continued, but in particular the practice of hiring inexperienced young men like Pitkin, then turning them “loose in insane asylums, apparently under the presumption that the insane, of all classes of invalids, require less medical care.”
That it was as bad as the doctor said was later confirmed by Josephine Shaw Lowell. A young physician from Blackwell’s had confided to her, “We go there to learn. Of course we make horrible mistakes. . . . And when we learn all we want to, we resign and another greenhorn is put in.” In two years, she told the committee, there have been eighteen different physicians. Eighteen rounds of horrible mistakes.
Much of the Committee’s focus was on restraints. Physician after physician protested about their excessive usage. Dr. William J. Morton, a professor at the University of Vermont, described seeing a particularly agitated patient in a crib. The man was “in the frenzy of melancholia, and his beating about the cage, it was a very horrible spectacle. . . . I thought at the time it would be a great mercy if they would tip it on end, and give him a chance to stand up, or give him a chance to sit up, but this forcing him to lie on his hands and feet, it seems to me a very cruel process.”
Dr. Thomas M. Franklin, who had taken over the Asylum from Alexander E. Macdonald, was asked about what kind of restraints were in use.
“We employ the camisole mostly; we employ wristlets to a small extent, and we own one or two muffs, and we use that much-abused institution, the crib or protected bed, of which we own four and of which I wish we owned more.”
Senator Woodin had to make sure he heard correctly. “You would employ more if you had them?”
“Yes, sir.” He was having one built right now for a new patient, as a matter of fact, and he was hurrying “its completion for her use” out of a “sense of duty.” Besides, cribs looked worse than they actually were.
“Did you ever try to take a night’s rest in one of them, doctor?” Woodin asked.
“No, sir.”
“Wouldn’t that be about as good a way to determine whether it is altogether comfortable or not; with the lid fastened down I mean?”
“I think not, sir. . . . It prevents no motion except that of sitting up,” Franklin responded.
Woodin wouldn’t let him off the hook. Trying spending a night in one, “with the lid locked down.”
The Reverend William Glenney French made his first appearance at the inquiry on Monday, December 6. “You hold a communication in your hand,” Woodin began. It was an urgent telegram French had received the night before from his superior, the Rev. Curtis T. Woodruff. “Will you allow me to take the communication?” Woodin asked. French stepped forward. “Of course I am very glad to further personally any examination into lunatic asylums. . . . But this stops me at present.” The Senators read the telegram and conferred. “Well, we will allow you to halt here for the time and that is all.” But he was expected back there the very next morning at 10 a.m. One more thing, the committee asked, how might we find Rev. Woodruff? We want to have a word with him as well.
William W. Strew, the former superintendent, was sworn in a little later. Strew immediately defended his tenure at Blackwell’s. He claimed his ouster was all political theatre. There “had been so much said in the papers about the complaints about the institution,” Commissioner Brennan had told him, “that they felt there must be something done; somebody must be sacrificed to political necessity.”
“Did they use that language?” Woodin asked.
“Yes, sir; it was a necessity. If I did not resign their heads would have to come off.” Given what so many others had said about how politics influenced appointments, Strew’s claim had the ring of truth. Further, he argued that his difficulty in maintaining discipline was due in part to the commissioners themselves. He would suspend an incompetent worker only to have the commissioners return the worker to duty. “It creates a spirit of exultation first, and insubordination. . . . They regard it as of little account, because they have got a power behind the throne that they can go to—the Commissioners.”
Perhaps Strew was no worse than any of the previous superintendents. Maybe in one respect a little better. The senator’s questioning revealed that it was Strew who instituted the practice of keeping track of the use of restraints in a separate log book. “When I went there I found they were in the habit of using restraint indiscriminately. . . . One of the first and worst abuses that my attention was called to was its use by the attendants unknown to the physicians, and by the physicians to gratify the attendants unknown to the Superintendent. If a patient was in any way troublesome and they required to be with her and watch her they found it much more convenient to strap her in a chair or put her under restraint so that they could go and attend to their own business or do something else. Consequently there was too much restraint used, altogether.” The log book introduced at least some measure of transparency.
The news of French’s eleventh-hour communication from his superior had made the rounds and the next morning Parlor No. 125 was as crowded as Sister Mary’s courtroom had been. Everyone leaned left and right, in an effort to catch a better view when French’s supervisor, the Reverend Curtis T. Woodruff, superintendent of the New-York Protestant Episcopal City Mission Society, who’d received his own eleventh-hour communication—a subpoena—was sworn in. The New York Times wrote that Woodruff, whom they described as “short and stout,” and with a “florid complexion,” took the stand “with ill-concealed diffidence.”
The exchange between Woodruff and the senators was lengthy and heated, and the following is an edited version of what took place (as are all the questions and answers between the other witnesses and the senators in this chapter).
With Woodruff’s telegram in his hand, Senator Fowler got right to the point. “You state here to Mr. French, ‘you have no business to testify before that Committee (meaning this Committee) at all.’ On what do you base that statement?”
“On the ground, sir, that he is not supposed to know any thing about what has transpired on the Island at all; he is forbidden by the rules of the society to do any thing, except attend to his own spiritual matters.”
“You state in this letter that if he testifies he does it at the risk of losing his position.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you mean to say that this society which is a society in my own church would dismiss a faithful servant for telling the truth under compulsion?”
“No, sir, I do not mean to say such a thing as that at all.”
“Are you conscious of the fact that the subpoena of this committee compels his attendance under pain of imprisonment?”
“Yes, sir, I am.”
“Well, what do you mean by that when you say that if he testifies he does it at the risk of losing his position?”
“The fact, sir, that he can testify at all disqualifies him according to the rules of the society from being an employee of the society.”
“If while he were holding religious service there an attendant should in cold blood murder a patient, would he be discharged because he saw it and was compelled to testify to the fact?”
“No, sir, I suppose not.”
But Woodruff’s reluctance was not about the rules of the Society, it soon became clear, it was about avoiding displeasing the Commissioners of the Department of Public Charities and Correction, who could kick them off the Island at any time and not allow any from their Society to return. French had almost been banned from the Island by the commissioners when he went to the papers with “charges of various kinds against the Commissioners of Charities and Correction as to the internal affairs of the Asylums,” Woodruff testified. The commissioners thought it was “unfair; he is there by the courtesy of the board, and it is unfair for a man who has the freedom of the Island, the right to go in and out of the wards freely as the spiritual adviser, to take advantage of his position and bring to the public things that he may hear; little abuses, or large abuses, whatever they may be. They think it is unfair and unjust, and I think you can but feel it, it is so, sir; if a minister should come into your family to advise your patients would you think it right for him to go down into your kitchen to look at the food you ate, and interview your servants?”
“And you think these are analogous cases?”
“I think they are, sir.”
“He is there discharging a duty . . . to a class of unfortunates who cannot speak for themselves and you regard that as analogous to a meddlesome Paul Pry coming into a private family?”
“He is there to spiritually advise the patients and nothing more; his duty stops there.”
“Then you think if a person occupying the position Mr. French does, as a witness of abuses it is his duty to keep it from the public?”
“His duty is to communicate it to me and I have from time to time communicated with them [the Commissioners of Charities and Correction]. . . . My object was simply to come before you gentlemen and appeal to you as gentlemen and Christian gentlemen not to interfere with the work of the Society by requiring one of our missionaries to come before a board and testify to abuses or things he may have seen while in the discharge of his spiritual duties.”
“I think it is the opinion of this Committee that if your Society tolerates abuses there and conceals them from the public the quicker you are got off the Island the better it is for those poor unfortunates there.”
Over Woodruff’s protests, Senator Fowler read Woodruff’s letter to French aloud.
From the office of the New York Protestant Episcopal City Mission Society, at 306 Mulberry Street. New York, Dec. 6, 1880.
It is now just half past nine o’clock and you are not summoned to appear before ten A. M.
You had no right to go away without seeing me first; you have no business to testify before that committee at all, for you are not supposed to know anything at all in regard to the abuses, if any exist, in the asylum. You testify at the risk of losing your position; read what is said on page twelve of the by-laws, which I send you by bearer. Your simple duty is to read your plain instructions and say that you have nothing to testify about the internal affairs of the asylum. That don’t [sic] come under your jurisdiction; you are there only to care for the spiritual welfare of the inmates and nothing more. It was very wrong in you not to wait and see me, for we could have talked the matter over and decided what to do. As I said before you will testify at the risk of losing your position, for there is a strong feeling in the board on the subject in regard to what has transpired in time past, and a stronger feeling on the part of the commissioners.
Hoping you will consider these things.
Truly yours,
C. T. WOODRUFF, Superintendent, etc.
“You never attempted to investigate any of these alleged charges of abuses existing?” Fowler asked.
“No, sir, I did not, because it was not my business,” Woodruff replied.
“Would you not regard it as a part of your duty to inquire into any grave abuse of twelve or fifteen hundred helpless lunatics?”
“I should not; I am there for a different purpose.”
“The church then, or the City Mission Society, cares nothing at all for the temporal wants and physical comfort of these unfortunates, but only looks after their spiritual welfare?”
“That is it, except so far as they do individually, sir; they give refreshments and various little things patients may need, but nothing further. They feel they have no right to say any thing or ask any questions.”
“I am a little curious to know what this City Mission Society deems its duty in a case of this sort, and therefore I ask you whether, if Mr. French should see a brutal assistant murder a patient, he would incur the displeasure of this Society if he interfered to protect the lunatic?”
“Well, I do not know; I could not answer such a question as that; you might ask me the same question with reference to a man in the street; if he should stop and look on and see a brawl, he could or not interfere as he saw fit.”
“Will he be discharged if we force him to testify?”
“I think not, sir; he will be discharged, if at all, because he has allowed himself to go outside of his regular duty and see these things, and look into these other matters that belong to other people, and not him.”
“You had better employ a blind man,” Senator Pitts spat out.
“Yes,” Senator Fowler added in disgust, “and a man without any bowels of compassion.”
Once more Woodin tried to make Woodruff concede the moral imperative. “If he tells the truth and speaks of abuses . . . wouldn’t it be right, if he knows the fact of abuses, to state them?”
But Woodruff would not concede. French should have “simply attended to his spiritual duties and nothing more. . . . That is the true course for a Christian minister to take.”
And with that, Rev. French, whom the New York Times described as a “venerable old man, with kindly lineaments” was recalled. Many years later, in his obituary in the Churchman, French would be commended for his actions on this day. “The active and manly part which the single-hearted missionary took in bringing about these reforms is a matter of civic history.” They praised how “he did not hesitate to give evidence, both full and free,” without mentioning how the Society did everything it could to prevent him.
After eight years on the Island, French had accumulated “some five or six folio manuscript books and four or five quartos” worth of entries about what he’d witnessed, and he had a lot to say. He began with the story of Jane Stevens, a woman around thirty-five years old who’d regularly attended his services. When she didn’t show up for a few weeks he went looking for her. He found her outside, sitting at the foot of a tree.
“You have not been to my service for two or three weeks. What is the matter?”
Stevens told him that she’d been transferred from the relatively pleasant Hall 3, where French conducted his services at that time, to one of the much less desirable Pavilions. When she refused to leave the Hall without first collecting her clothes, the nurse got two men who “took her by the shoulders, one on each shoulder, and pushed her out and pushed her along to the stairs,” roughing her up so badly she’d been crippled and unable to stand ever since. (The newspapers had reported at the time that she’d been pushed down the stairs. French stopped short of making this assertion.)
A nurse and others later confirmed to French what Jane had told him.
“What subsequently became of this woman, Jane?” senator Pitts asked.
“She was removed to the alms-house and put into the hospital, and died there . . . a little over a year ago,” French answered, adding that he “never, from the first to the last, saw any thing in her that indicated insanity, except when she first went in there. She had been disappointed in love, she said, outside, and she did not care whether she lived or died.”
“Do you know what occasioned her death?”
French had asked the young physician in charge of the hospital if her death could have been the result of how she’d been treated, and was told “that it could have easily come from it.”
When French spoke to a reporter about what happened to Jane Stevens, the commissioners punished him by taking away the special key he’d been given with access to all of the Asylum.
“I would like to say to the honorable committee,” French added, “that I have disagreed in principle from the Society and Superintendent in regard to my duty as a Christian and a man.”
“That is obvious enough by your keeping this record,” Senator Woodin responded, referring to his journals.
French then told them the story of Sister Mary Stanislaus, who he knew well, and how she had been mistreated and locked up in solitary, in a room too dark for him to peer into, all because she had sought help for a fellow patient.
“Do you know the name of the nurse and attendant?”
“I know the name of the nurse; she is dead, sir. I know she was a very cruel woman.”
This led to French unburdening himself of one evil it’s clear he’d wanted to talk about for some time: the nurses and attendants. Some “were compassionate, considerate to the patients, and apparently did everything in their power to make them comfortable; and I have known others that I should judge from their treatment of the patients had no higher idea of their duty than a herdsman would have with a company or herd of beasts. . . . Many of them have not humanity enough to be a nurse, and some of them have not intelligence enough; some of them have not education enough; and perhaps what is more important than all in my estimation, they have not tact, tact and sympathy,” nor, he added, “patience.”
“Neither the commissioners nor the doctors, the chief nor the assistants could discover, unless it were by accident, many things that have been done, and probably many things that are done and will be done,” French continued. “The physicians generally make one visitation during the day, unless called specially to go the rounds; after that time the patients are in the hands of the nurses entirely.”
“You think the fault of the system is that it is infected with politics?”
“I think that almost every evil that has been connected with the institution would be remedied in time, and a very speedy time, if there were no appointments made of any but intelligent, humane, conscientious people—sympathizing people.”
French had never spoken to the commissioners, or anyone at the asylum, about the abuses. Not only did he feel he could “not remedy it,” he thought he “might produce more trouble in the remedy.” But he did tell Rev. Woodruff. “I have told him of cases, these and others, and told him at the same time that I felt as if it was a duty to bring those things before the Commissioners. . . . He usually put the matter aside by saying that they did not care [to] interfere with such things.” French testified for a while longer, and then he was asked to review his notes and come back another day.
Commissioner Townsend Cox wasted no time in giving his opinion about French when he was sworn in a little later.
“I thought Mr. French seemed to be more of a meddling old woman than a missionary, from certain actions of his, and it seemed as if he was more interested in giving items to reporters than he was in any good that might come to the inmates of the institution; he seemed to be more inclined to try to get up a sensation in the newspapers than to do any good.”
“Did you ever think to inquire into them, to see whether they were true or not?”
“I don’t remember whether we did or not; most likely we did.”
“Don’t you think now that was a matter of sufficient importance to have called for some action, investigation or inquiry on your part?”
“We no doubt did investigate, but I cannot remember in this particular case.”
French was quick to defend himself when he returned the following day, December 9. “If in this I act the roll of the meddlesome old woman . . . I accept the term as of the highest honor. I have never communicated with any reporter, save one—and it was a misfortune which came near my downfall. He did not record me correctly . . . I came very near being dismissed from the island.”
French had many years to consider what he said soon after.
“Place a nurse or attendant in charge of a large hall containing over seventy patients, such nurse appointed by political influence, without regard to education, moral character, training for the special work, humanity, good temper and conscience, and we can easily see what might be done. . . . Nurses chosen without respect to their fitness in any respect for the place, and shut up in a hall like those halls of the asylum, we can imagine any thing almost to be done with impunity.”
“Go on then?”
“The buildings are such that anything might be done which an ignorant, cruel or passionate nurse or official might be prompted to do. . . . The nurse has full control and . . . any deed could be committed, and no testimony of the patient would be believed against the word of the nurse. The patient is supposed, being in a lunatic asylum, to be incapable of giving testimony against an official.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well, sir, if a patient were to make complaint to the principal officer, the nurse would be brought in, and by her explanations of the matter could set aside any thing that the patient could say in her own behalf.”
“And no further notice taken of it?”
“No further notice taken of it.”
French gave an alarming example of brutality ignored. “Within the last two weeks a young lady—a nurse—of her own accord told me that the reason why her mother, also a nurse and a very kind-hearted lady, left the island was her indignation at the cruelty of a fellow nurse who held a patient of filthy habits from disease, in the water of the bath until her face was livid. The daughter told me that both her mother and the fellow nurse were sent before the Commissioners, but both were continued on in office, but her mother found herself so worried in the place that she resigned and is now engaged in private nursing. I would add that the nurse who did that is at present a nurse in the institution.”
“Now have you any objection to giving the names of those who were witnesses to it?”
French gave them names, Mary Williams and her mother, but the two women were never called. French also testified about the practice of bathing many women in the same bath water, a fact that he’d heard it from so many sources he had absolutely no doubt it was true. “The water was put into the bath and . . . one after the other, as many as could be bathed at a time, passed through it unchanged.”
In spite of the fact that this practice had been reported many times, and had come up in investigations before, the senators didn’t believe him. How could any one patient know how many people had been in the same bath water before and after unless she remained in the bathroom the entire time? It’s not clear if Dr. Parsons was in the room when French addressed bathing at the Asylum, but he would have been able to confirm that not changing the water between bathers was standard operating procedure. He’d written about it in the Department of Public Charities and Correction’s 1867 annual report.
The Senate committee continued to hear testimony through to the following year and a report was issued on April 5, 1882. It was presented without making a single recommendation for improving the management of the insane.
The following April the American Journal of Insanity printed a response.
This document consists of about one thousand pages. Persons were examined at various periods down to the close of the legislative session of 1881, and the committee was continued with a view of further inquiry and authorized to report at the legislative session of 1882. At that session the committee submitted the testimony and reported that they had no recommendations to make.
After running over the “evidence” we can well understand why the committee had nothing to recommend. In the whole mass of testimony there is not a new idea in regard to legal provisions for admission, discharge, organization, management or internal administration of asylums. . . . Most of the “witnesses” . . . are persons who have figured before the public for some years past in the role of lunacy reformers in various associations, periodicals and pamphlets which they have given wide circulation, and their “testimony” is merely a re-hash of all this. The “testimony” of several consisted very largely in quotations from the reports and writings of Dr. Gray, Dr. Macdonald and other members of the Association of Superintendents, and of assertions and allegations, but nothing really rising above the grade of misrepresentation, cavil and quibble.
French’s testimony was not mentioned.
Meanwhile the Asylum population kept growing. In their 1881 annual report, the Department of Public Charities and Correction commissioners lamented the “constantly menacing increase of the insane.” The use of restraints also continued unabated, only now whenever patients in camisoles left the Asylum, they were covered with shawls to hide them.
In 1886, the position of General Superintendent of the New York City Asylums for the Insane was created, and Alexander E. Macdonald, who had testified before the Senate committee in 1880 (and was called “backward” by Dr. Edward Spitzka), was appointed as the first General Superintendent. The institutions he was now responsible for were:
Pavilion for the Insane at Bellevue Hospital
The New York City Lunatic’s Asylum on Blackwell’s Island
The New York City Asylum for the Insane on Wards Island
The Idiot Asylum on Randalls Island
The Branch Asylums on Wards, Hart, and Randalls Island
The farm on Long Island
There were moments in Macdonald’s 1880 testimony where he admitted things were truly horrendous at the asylums, and that change was needed. He had addressed their absurd and inhumane budget, which was already low when the per capita allowance per patient had been 37 cents, but they were now “clothing, feeding, treating, housing and warming our patients for the sum of twenty-four cents a day each.” To keep costs that low, inmates were fed crappier and crappier food, and less of it.
But he never reached the level of frankness that is found in his first report as General Superintendent in 1886. The promotion seemed to have filled him with purpose. Or perhaps he resented having to answer to the state and now that he wasn’t being interrogated he felt free to tell the truth.
Because he now confirmed what both French and Strew had testified six years earlier, that at the hand of the attendants, “instances of neglect, even of violence, are of far too frequent occurrence.” And, on the few occasions when attendants were found guilty of deliberate cruelty or of being drunk on the job, they were allowed to resign and then were rehired soon after. Macdonald also confessed that for the commissioners, getting costs down was paramount, and “the nobler office of curing them becomes of secondary importance. . . . To be sure some of them will die, but so much the better for the tax-payers!”
French’s annual reports were equally dark. The year Macdonald was made the first General Superintendent, French wrote, “Blackwell’s Island, as a whole, is the cesspool of New York City.”
Women were still being housed in the Lodge even though the building had been condemned. Repeatedly. Death rates at the Asylum, which were already considered deplorable, continued to rise. Ninety-eight people died in the Asylum in 1880. In 1887, a year after Macdonald was appointed, the number was up to 173. Perhaps this was because since 1880 the “constantly menacing increase of the insane” had grown 28 percent.
As these terrible numbers continued to soar, a twenty-three-year-old novice journalist named Elizabeth Cochran was offered an assignment of a lifetime. Her editor asked her if she’d be willing to get herself committed to the Lunatic Asylum in order to write under cover about the alleged abuses. She couldn’t resist. The articles she wrote for the New York World came out soon afterwards in a book titled, Ten Days in a Mad-House. Ten days was all she could withstand. There were cruel nurses in her account, too, and stories so over the top her report reads like a script for a horror movie.