FOREWORD

Throughout its history Oregon State Hospital has frequently ranked as the most misunderstood, maligned, malnourished, even mysterious of all the institutions under the aegis of state government.

The nature of the hospital itself is partly to blame. Of all human maladies that have been cured or at least brought under control in the last century, mental illness remains one of the most elusive to medical science. Breakthroughs in medication have helped some, but the need for someplace to isolate the “crazies” among us persists and probably always will.

I use the term “crazies” advisedly.

Several of my young years were spent in Salem during the 1940s. My friends and I were well aware of the gothic hulk out on Center Street. “That’s where they keep the crazies,” we told one another. We accepted as gospel rumors of the unbalanced behavior behind those forbidding walls and the physical indignities suffered in the name of restoring sanity. Likely as not, one or the other of us had some family member, or knew of some family member or friend, who had spent time there.

Salem was still a small town. Word got around. And, as it turns out, many of the “treatments” employed at the hospital, viewed in today’s bright light, can only be classified as draconian if not out-and-out torture.

Not that, for the most part, the hospital staff were not deeply dedicated to the task at hand. They were diligent both in tending to patients’ comfort and in the effort to restore them to a meaningful role on the outside.

Years later, in 1964, as a neophyte reporter for the old Salem Capital Journal, I received a lasting lesson in hospital philosophy from its superintendent (1955–1981), Dr. Dean Brooks, whom I described as “the smiling, mild-mannered psychiatrist, superintendent, shepherd, administrator, father confessor and arbitrator responsible for the sprawling institution.”

It was springtime. The legislature was in session. Money was short. The hospital was running $100 per day over its drug budget. Disapproving glances emanated from the legislative budget barons.

“Dr. Brooks hastens to assure…[that] although problems do exist, the hospital’s total program is not threatened,” I reported at the time. “He makes it clear that his concern, and consequently the hospital’s, is to heal the patients’ minds to a point where they can once again function in society. If a drug will help, fine. If not, better to use another approach.”

Thus was it ever at the hospital, virtually from the day in 1883 when the state transferred patients from the privately run Hawthorne Asylum in East Portland to the spanking new Oregon State Insane Asylum in Salem, itself conceived to save the state a bundle of money.

As dynamic and often disturbing as the hospital has been over its 120 years, no one until now undertook to track its history. There have been multitudinous newspaper articles and scholarly studies and papers but nothing comprehensive to lift the veil for the public to see and assess what the hospital has been and is all about.

Diane Goeres-Gardner, whose previous two books dealt with unseemly but intriguing aspects of Oregon history, has accepted that challenge. It was partly by accident, partly by logical progression that she was led to chronicle the hospital.

In the early 2000s she was researching family pioneers who came across the Oregon Trail in 1852 and settled in Tillamook. As she tracked ancestors via microfilms of old newspapers at the University of Oregon Knight Library in Eugene, she kept coming across accounts of public hangings.

Before 1903 when the state took over the task, local sheriffs dutifully dispatched criminals sentenced to death. Those ceremonies tended to attract curious throngs, often taking on a carnival atmosphere with the execution as the climactic feature. Goeres-Gardner stockpiled those stories, which became Necktie Parties: Legal Executions in Oregon, 1851–1905, published in 2005.

In the course of that endeavor, Goeres-Gardner also came across stories about women who had run afoul of the state’s justice system. In 2009 came Murder, Morality and Madness: Women Criminals in Early Oregon. A variety of those cases led her to the Oregon State Insane Asylum, where female offenders (the state then lacking a women’s prison) were commonly incarcerated.

Thence this work, Inside Oregon State Hospital: A History of Tragedy and Triumph. It’s a story long overdue and begging to be told. It’s a saga not only of individuals subjected to the mental health system but of the system itself and the social and therapeutic climates that altered it through the years. Now, at last, she finds a glimmer of hope at the end of the tunnel.

JOHN TERRY

John Terry is a retired journalist whose career, starting in 1963 with the Salem Capital Journal, spanned fifty years. For fifteen years starting in 1997, he wrote a weekly column on Oregon history for The Oregonian.