Bad company. Women trouble. Hysteria. Female disease.
These are just four of the 86 reasons patients were admitted to the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane in the 19th century.
The list compiled information from patients admitted between 1864 and 1899. Sculptor Kimberly Chapman came across the list several years ago while researching the history of women in asylums. The result of Champan’s research is her exhibit, “Eighty-Six Reasons for Asylum Admission: A Domestic Beginning.” It’s on view at Peg’s Gallery in downtown Hudson through Sept. 5.
When Chapman came across the list, she was struck by how many reasons applied only to women.
“There were people with mental illness that went there with the hopes of getting cured,” Chapman said. “You also, though, realize that it is a really convenient way for husbands to rid their outspoken, unruly, immoral wives and daughters, and then keep custody of the children and the home and all the material possessions at the same time.”
She continued, “But what would happen is, so many of these women would go in, and then over the decades, these men would die, and there’d be nobody to rescue them, to bring them out.”
As a Snopes article from 2016 explained, the entries on the list are less reasons for asylum admission and more “reasons why people were believed to have eventually developed illnesses” that led to asylum admission. Still, the history of women being involuntarily committed to asylums and the rampant abuse they experienced are well documented.
In Chapman’s art, that brutal history is on full display.
Chapman’s work illustrates reality of life in an asylum
Chapman, who is based in the Cleveland suburb of Moreland Hills, created the exhibit eight years ago and has continued to add to it. She spent about a year researching the history of women in asylums. She paid special attention to asylums designed by American psychiatrist Thomas Story Kirkbride in the 19th century.
Institutions constructed under the Kirkbride Plan featured wide, expansive buildings with lots of natural light and ample green space. Their design supported the moral treatment philosophy, a then-revolutionary approach to mental health care that emphasized compassion and humanity.
But as Chapman’s work illustrates, the reality of living in an asylum was far darker than Kirkbride’s idealized vision.
“Eighty-Six Reasons for Asylum Admission: A Domestic Beginning” spans the first floor of the historic Baldwin Buss Merino House. Peg’s Foundation, the philanthropic organization behind the gallery, purchased and restored the 1825 Hudson hom in 2020.
The piece “Voyeurism Comes At A Painful Cost” consists of 11 hands that appear to reach out to the viewer, palms up. Like all the sculptures in the exhibit, they are made from white porcelain. Many of the hands are wrapped in bandages. A few hold tokens of different sizes.
The small tokens represent shillings, or British coins. They reference the tradition at St. Bethlem Royal Hospital in England of charging members of the public a shilling for a chance to visit the institution and observe its patients. The larger tokens are purely a creation by Chapman, representing commemorative coins for visitors to remember their experience.
“I thought, the only thing more crazy than this,” Chapman said of the public visits, “is if then, they would purchase a souvenir shilling on the way out. Now that’s just me making that up, but I thought, I’m going to do these jumbo souvenir shillings, because if you’re that kind of person that wants to go in and see that kind of suffering, then you may want to remember it.”
Harm to women in institutions at forefront of Peg’s Gallery exhibit
The work “Female Phrenology Study Kit” is a nod to sculptor and phrenologist William Bally. He created 60 small plaster heads, all male, of varying shapes and sizes. Bally was a proponent of phrenology, a pseudoscience that studied the bumps and recesses on human’s skulls as predictors of mental traits.
“Kind of like a crystal ball, basically,” Chapman said, “but it was quack science.”
In the center of the house’s main room sits “Championship Cup Trophies to Male Medical Misogyny.” The sculptures are grotesque, tongue-in-cheek awards to three men whom Chapman deemed as doing the most harm to women.
Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond photographed patients at the English asylum where he worked. He believed he could diagnose them based on their facial expressions. His award features some of his photos.
A row of teeth adorn the trophy for Dr. Henry Cotton. It’s a nod to Cotton’s belief that an infection in the mouth could lead to mental illness. This led him to remove thousands of teeth from unwilling patients at New Jersey’s Trenton State Hospital. The third championship cup is for Dr. Egas Moniz, who won the Nobel Prize for developing the lobotomy. The sculpture features photos of people post-surgery.
Work of Peg’s Foundation rooted in mental health care
The exhibit is a fitting choice for Peg’s Gallery. Peg Morgan founded the foundation to support those affected by mental illness. As Courtney Cable, director of arts and campus programs, explained, the mission was personal for Morgan, who died in 2013 at age 95. Her youngest child developed schizophrenia in his early 20s. The family struggled to find care for him at a time when the disorder was not well understood.
“She wanted to contribute to other people [who are] helping to find those resources,” Cable said. “You need a support network. You need professionals that understand. You need a community that cares. You need all these things, because it’s not gonna go away, and those are things that were really difficult to suss out [in the] ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s.”
In commemoration of Peg Foundation’s 25th anniversary, Cable curated an exhibit about the organization’s history in its main building next to the Baldwin Buss Merino House.
Chapman hopes her work, which is steeped in the past, allows visitors to “walk away with a better understanding of what women went through in these asylums” and the loss of agency the patients experienced.
