11/1/2022 1 Comment Dejarnette sanitarium![]() Administration buildings sat in the middle. The asylum was built in the same style as many other Victorian institutional facilities. The campus was divided between a women’s side and a men’s side with a violent end and a non-violent end. Patients’ afflictions ranged from severe mental and physical handicaps to “nervousness”, “chronic” to “acute” insanity, “feeblemindedness”, and “lunacy.” ![]() The dreadful situations patients were arriving from coupled with the lack of understanding of mental disability meant that Willard essentially became a dumping ground for undesirables. One girl had been shackled in a cell since childhood, another patient arrived at Willard in a chicken crate. The theme of horrific neglect would follow in patients admitted later. She was a woman named Mary Rote, described as “demented and deformed”, who had spent ten years confined to an almshouse. Willard welcomed its first patient in 1869. Abraham Lincoln himself signed off on the proposal a mere six days before his death. ![]() Willard proposed a state-run hospital for the insane. ![]() In response to these squalid conditions, New York’s Surgeon General Dr. In the early 19th century, those without anyone to care for them and incapable of taking care of themselves were left to almshouses (basically shelters) which were overcrowded and under resourced. Though asylums often carry connotations of dark and torturous existences, Willard and other institutions like it were intended to be a better alternative to systems in place for taking care of the mentally ill. The stately Victorian buildings may be falling to pieces, but the contents inside them betray a lot about the sometimes happy, sometimes tragic lives of patients at Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane. ![]()
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