Quakers All the Way Down: Lunacy & the Society of Friends in Early Philadelphia

– by Wood Institute travel grantee Sharlene Walbaum, Ph.D.*

 

Imagine this: it is 1750. You work a farm near Philadelphia. Your child, now a young adult, hears disturbing voices, is suspicious and fearful, and sometimes lashes out violently. It is terrible and sad. You feel the weight of responsibility to your child and to others. What are your choices? There are no emergency rooms, mental health care clinics, psychotherapists, or antipsychotic medications.

Families and communities were responsible for someone experiencing mental illness, although the ways in which that obligation was met seem cruel today. If the person was dangerous to self or others, he or she might live chained in a shed or a hole dug in the earthen floor of the kitchen that was covered with a grating. Or, he or she might face a potentially worse fate – jail or the almshouse. If danger was not a concern, he or she might be left to wander out of doors and depend on the kindness of neighbors. Confinement, incarceration, homelessness – how different are options today?

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Arrowhead Hot Springs Company

This month we are visiting the Arrowhead Hot Springs Company in San Bernardino, California. The mountain region known for its formations of light quartz was popular with Native Americans long before European settlement. There are multiple native legends for the landmark, one being that a flaming arrow led Native American Indians to the valley; hence, the arrow formation in stone pointing to the hot spring waters underneath.

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Dr. Brooks’ Sanatorium

This month we are heading to New Canaan, Connecticut. The original building that later held Brooks’ Sanatorium was built in 1898 by a wealthy summer resident, Ellen Josephine Hall. Hall purchased the 11 acre property with the intention of opening a sanatorium for her nephew, Dr. Charles Osborne. They left town and the building was sold to Dr. Myron J. Brooks and his wife, Marion.

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The Transformative Power of Diagnosis

– by Wood Institute travel grantee Annemarie Jutel*

 

The moment a serious diagnosis is named marks a boundary. As Suzanne Fleischmann wrote: “It serves to divide a life into “before” and “after,” and this division is henceforth superimposed onto every rewrite of the individual’s life story” (p. 10).   The power to cleave one’s sense of self in two is what Fleischmann referred to the “transformative power of the diagnosis.”  The illustration accompanying this post paints a picture most of us can immediately recognise, so often the power of diagnosis is referred to in popular culture, in medical and patient accounts of illness.

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