"IT WAS A BRILLIANT CURE - BUT WE'VE LOST THE PATIENT!"
1. DR. BENJAMIN RUSH'S "TRANQUILIZER CHAIR" (1811)
The most complete restraint of a patient's every move ever devised. 2. A board attached to the back of the chair which is made to rise and fall according to the height of the patient. To the end of the board is attached: 3. A wooden box lined with stuffed linen in which the patient's head is held immobile so it cannot move backward or forward, nor incline to either side. 4 & 5. Chest and belly bands, made of flat pieces of strong leather, which confine and limit the body's movement in the chair. 6. Strong leather bands which confine the arms and hands of the patient to the arms of the chair, thereby limiting their movement. 7. Pieces of wood which protrude slightly from the chair to which the patient's feet are confined, so as to prevent their moving in any direction. 8. A stool-pan (half-filled with water) attached so as to be drawn out from behind the chair and emptied and replaced, without removing or disturbing the patient. The chair is fastened to the floor so as to remain stationary. Sign the CineMania Guestbook
Throughout the course of history mankind's treatment of "the insane" has been, well, insane! While the day-to-day care of patients could be cruel, attempts at curing them could be even crueler. Everything from medieval chiseling of the skull to "let the devil escape" to the 1940's ice-pick lobotomies of Dr. Walter Freeman. In 1276, then Pope John XXI, who wrote several medical treatises, suggested that eating a roasted mouse "doth heal frantick persons." In the 16th Century it was believed that stones in the head caused madness. This belief is perpetuated in the oft-heard cliche "rocks in the head." Dr. Benjamin Rush (1745-1813), a pioneer of early American psychiatry, recommended relentlessly swinging the patient around to "shake out the madness." Following an enlightened attempt to reform madhouses, novelist Charles Dickens wrote: "Chains, straw, filthy solitude, darkness and starvation; jalap, syrup of buckthorn, tartarised antimony and ipecacuanha administered every spring and fall in fabulous doses to every patient, whether well or ill; spinning in whirligigs, corporal punishment, gagging, continued intoxication; nothing was too wildly extravagant, nothing too monstrously cruel to be prescribed by mad-doctors." Perhaps no single group has undergone more widespread experimentation than the destitute "mentally-ill" in state-run institutions. A major movie production recently filmed at an abandoned state "mental hospital" in the city of Danvers, Massachusetts, reveals the severity exacted by it's patients. Surgical tables and eerie artifacts left over from more than a century of often primitive methods of treating "the mentally-ill" have been left as they were at the hospital, which was abandoned in 1992. Cast and crew members were overwhelmed by the buildings disturbing aura. Said one crew member: "the walls there are very sad, full of hurt, it's not a place you take lightly."
Dr. Daniel Oxenbridge (1576-1642) a London physician, employed the latest methods in 1628 when trying to cure the young wife of a clothier. First he gave her an enema, then he bled her arms, her feet, and her forehead. After that, "once every three or four days, I either bled her or vomited her strongly." He then shaved off all the hair on her head to which he "applied the warm lungs of lambs, sheep and young whelps..."
Dr. Jan Baptista van Helmont (1577-1644) a Flemish physician, argued that water shock - to the brink of near death - could extinguish a mad person's "too violent and exorbitant form of fiery life." Dr. Jan Baptista discovered this "cure" by observing that "many fools who accidentally fall into water and are dragged out for dead are not only restored to life... but also to the full use of their understanding."
Dr. Benjamin Rush (1745-1813) is sometimes called the father of American psychiatry, however, what's conveniently overlooked in tributes to him is that he also drained buckets of blood from those he treated and was sometimes accused of killing more patients than the illness itself. He put his best hope for "the cure of mental illness" in "swinging." Dr. Rush argued that mental patients should be strapped into gyration devices, i.e., chairs suspended from the ceiling by chains, and that attendants should swing and spin them for hours. He believed that the spinning would reduce the force of the blood flowing into the brain, thereby relaxing the muscles and lowering the pulse. He also cited other positive effects from the spinning, pointing out that the induced vomiting would generate a healthy circulation. CineMania: Spread the Word and Stop the Stigma:
16th Century: Extracting the Stone of Madness
19th Century: "Shaking out the Madness"
French and British doctors experimented with the transfusion of sheep's blood into their patients... hoping that the life force of a docile creature "might tame their mad passions." In France, Dr. Jean Denis tried it on a patient, with, at first, good results. In England, on November 23rd, 1667, an "insane" man named Arthur Coga was paid twenty shillings to undergo the transfusion, receiving up to twelve ounces of blood from the four-footed beast. "Some think it may have a good effect upon him as a frantic man by cooling his blood," wrote famed diarist Samuel Pepys. Following the transfusion Pepys noted that, "he is a little cracked in his head, though he speaks very reasonably." In January of the following year, back in France, Dr. Denis performed another transfusion on his patient because he'd had a "mental relapse". The patient died and Dr. Jean Denis was accused of murder. Sheep transfusion fell out of vogue shortly thereafter. Between 1906 and 1917, psychiatrist Giuseppe Paravicini dissected patients at the Mombello Provincial Mental Health Center in Italy and sawed off their body parts, including heads, arms and ears. In 1980, the extremely well-preserved bodies of people who had been mummified, apparently some while still alive were discovered, along with the head of a woman, an aborted fetus, brains, kidneys, lungs, legs, arms and ears. ("Il Secolo", Milano, Italy, Feb. 12th, 1980)
Dr. Henry Cotten (1886-1933), acting on his theory that infections caused mental illness, surgically removed "potentially infected" body parts. "The insane are physically ill," he stated, arguing that if a doctor could locate and remove the infection, he could abruptly stop the lunacy. Dr. Cotton ordered 11,000 teeth removed from 1919 to 1921 from his patients at Trenton State Hospital in New Jersey. When the patient wasn't cured by the dental work, the doctor surgically removed parts of the stomach, bowels and/or genitalia. "It was awful to work there", recalled one hospital employee. "There was a young girl who worked in the office right by the door where they had to roll the baskets past that carried the bodies and organs and stuff. One day she ran out screaming that she couldn't take it any longer." The mortality rate among those treated by Dr. Cotton hit 43%!
According to Galen the ancient Greeks sometimes applied an electric eel to the body to numb pain, or to the head to alleviate headaches. The Greek word for electric eel was "narka", hence the word "narcotics", meaning drugs that numb the pain. In the 18th century Benjamin Franklin, who sustained two electric shocks himself, inflicting minor retrograde amnesia, suggested "trying the practice on mad people." So in 1787, Dr. John Birch, a British doctor, did just that, trying to cure a popular but suicidal singer suffering from depression. The more modern pioneer in this field was the Italian doctor Ugo Cerletti who in 1938 noticed that workers in a slaughterhouse used electric shock to send pigs into convulsions in order to make killing them easier. This is what electroshock "therapy" does to humans. It generates a severe grand mal convulsion of long duration through the application of 180 to 460 volts of electricity across the brain (hence the acronym ECT/electro-convulsive therapy), frequently inducing amnesia. During the first World War an electric shock box was designed for use on German soldiers who were afraid to fight on the battlefield. Since it's inception, it's very design was a means of discipline used to enforce the honor demanded of German soldiers. With this instrument it was not uncommon for German soldiers to be killed, not by the war, but by electro-convulsive electrocutions. During World War II, German doctors found other uses for electroshock. Between 1939 and 1941, they produced a film called "The Mentally-Ill" which presented the pros and cons of electroshock and gassing procedures. Incredibly, this film details the false notion of curing "the mentally-ill" with electroshock and proposes gassing them to death as the only other alternative. Following a series of shock treatments at the Mayo Clinic in 1960 and 1961, Ernest Hemingway lamented: "It was a brilliant cure - but we've lost the patient!!!" One month after his final shock treatment and a few days after being released from the clinic, Hemingway committed suicide. In the introduction to "The History of Shock Treatment", psychiatrist Dr. Lee Coleman said of ECT: "The changes one sees when electroshock is administered are completely consistent with any acute brain injury such as a blow to the head from a hammer. In essence, what happens is that the individual is dazed, confused and disoriented, and therefore cannot appreciate current problems." In 1970, as he recalled the first time he had performed ECT on a human being, Cerletti remarked to a colleague: "When I saw the patient's reaction, I thought to myself, this ought to be abolished!" While some psychiatrists still deny that electroshock causes irreversible brain damage and memory loss, neurologists & anesthesiologists empathically disagree. Studies between 1979 and 1991 revealed abnormal neurological signs following electroshock, as well as brain atrophy and enlarged ventricles (see: Archives of General Psychiatry). This procedure is still practiced today as a form of involuntary treatment.
THE ICE-PICK MAN COMETH
The year 1935 marked a return to the medieval art of psychosurgery with techniques similar to those used 800 years earlier to "drive out the devil." After drilling two or more holes into the skull, surgeons inserted into the patient's brain any of a number of various instruments - some resembling an apple corer, a butter spreader, or an ice pick - and often, without being able to see what they were cutting, destroyed parts of the brain. An early pioneer of the lobotomy, Portuguese neurosurgeon Dr. Egas Moniz, stabbed long thin blades into the brains of patients who had had holes drilled into their heads. As fate would have it, Moniz was shot and paralyzed by one of his lobotomy victims in 1939 and beaten to death by another in 1955. The idea didn't gain much momentum until Dr. Walter Freeman and Dr. James Watts pioneered lobotomies in America. Dr. Freeman preferred entering through the eyesocket with an ice-pick. One gloomy October morning in front of an audience of psychiatrists and photographers a group of female patients were wheeled into his operating room. After a brief discourse on the wonders of psychosurgery, Dr. Freeman went to work. As the first patient was wheeled in before him, he put electrodes on her temple and shocked her into a faint. He then lifted her left eyelid and plunged the ice-pick into her head. As he pulled it out, another woman was wheeled in before him. Again he shocked and plunged, and so on, until even the director of the hospital near collapse with nausea left the room! In 1948, Dr. Freeman performed his most famous lobotomy when he hammered his ice-pick into the head of actress Frances Farmer. Before her death at the age of 57, by now desititute, Mrs. Farmer was quoted as saying: "Never console yourself into believing that the terror has passed, for it looms as large and evil as it did in the despicable era of Bedlam. But I must relate the horrors as I recall them, in the hope that some force for mankind might be moved to relieve forever the unfortunate creatures who are still imprisoned in the back wards of decaying institutions." By 1955, more than 40,000 lobotomies had been performed on men, women and children in the U.S. alone, and tens of thousands more worldwide. Today under the newly-sanitized guise of neurosurgery, lobotomy advocates such as the Scottish Secretary of Health propose that lobotomies be performed on patients without their consent. (Outrage Over Banned Brain Ops in Scotland "The Big Issue" January 22-28, 1998) An article in "Discover" magazine quotes neurosurgeon Frank Vertosick as noting that: "Finding a paper extolling the virtues of psychosurgery in today's medical literature is rather like finding one advocating blood-letting." He equated it to repairing a computer with a chain saw. (Discover, Oct. 1997)
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Bibliography: Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry (1535-1860): A History Presented in Selected English Texts, by Richard Hunter and Ida McAlpine (London 1963)
From Shaman to Psychotherapist: A History of the Treatment of Mental Illness, by Walter Bromberg, M.D. (1975)
Great and Desperate Cures: The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness, by Elliot Valenstein (1986)
The Case Against Electroshock Treatment: USA Today Newsmagazine, The Magazine of the American Scene, November 1998
