HORROR & FASCINATION at the Glore Psychiatric Museum | History Traveler Episode 216

[Music] holy smokes that was wild the place that i am walking out of right now was something else um this is the galore psychiatric museum in st joseph missouri which is the the former site of missouri state lunatic asylum number two and i i typically don't show you know the end at the beginning uh but this place is wild and what i saw and what i learned in here uh is something else so uh anyway this is definitely one to watch all the way to the end so so [Music] missouri but is known today okay so we just got in here into the museum and what we're looking at here is an aerial shot of state hospital number two which was opened in 1874 here in st joseph missouri [Music] here's a large picture of some of the people who worked at state hospital number three so again we're at state hospital number two um and this is kind of shocking uh this is a restraint cage that was used at state hospital number three or the one in fulton and uh yeah this would be used to hold patients who were possible threats interesting all right we're entering into the museum now and as you're walking in they have this quote that i think is worth reflecting on says every individual who has a brain is liable to insanity precisely as everyone who has lungs is liable to pneumonia that's a very good way to to think about mental illness if we're talking about the history of the treatment of mental illness we really have to talk about dorothea dix this is a woman who in the 1840s was living in massachusetts and really had a lot of compassion on the the mentally ill who she was seeing in uh in her own state and uh started advocating for them and advocating for reforms to you know have standards of treatment so that they wouldn't be abused in the way that she was seeing here's a another guy who's kind of a pioneer in the treatment of the the mentally ill this is a guy by the name of thomas kirkbride and he came up with this plan for these asylums where if you look kind of like at these blueprints you'll notice that there's a little bit of a staggered design in the building layout well this was to try and maximize the amount of airflow and light that could reach the patients who were staying in these asylums so again we're in state lunatic asylum number two this is the grand staircase that was in the asylum as well as the original chandelier there was a fire that destroyed a lot of the original stuff and they had to of course rebuild but these are a few of the original items that would have been here in the state hospital okay we're gonna start from the bottom we're gonna go downstairs first and see what there is to see so this is something that's kind of interesting to me uh whenever you think of an insane asylum you might have visions in your head of people just sitting around in chairs with white walls and playing checkers all day and things like that well here at lunatic asylum number two they had you know different shops where people could create things so here are some weather veins that some of the patients created they also had as you can see here in this picture a farm on site so there would be some patient labor where they would you know have chores and they would grow stuff on a farm and by doing that the patients who worked on the farm could have a little bit of pride they're not only contributing to the efforts to feed themselves but they're also contributing to the the hospital staff and the community and having a sense of purpose here's a cafeteria table that that would have been here at the state hospital as well and something that i wouldn't have really even thought about but that they mentioned is that it's made from super heavy materials and the reason for that is that if somebody decided to jump up on the the table well it wouldn't tip over or disturb the other people we're going to move to the area where they talk about some of the treatments here in a moment but first i'm going to take a look in the morgue here now one thing that i saw on their orientation video for this museum they said was what they would tell some families and this is so sad they would tell them um for your relative bring the clothes that you want them to be buried in because they will likely never leave just a pretty sad ordeal but anyway here's a cooler here for the morgue and then oh dang okay so yeah they have a little table here to uh perform autopsies and then it looks like i have some remains of some headstones that were in the hospital cemetery not something that you really think about whenever you think of a mental health facility okay heading upstairs now have you ever heard of something called pica i know that i haven't i've heard of a pikachu but as it says here pica is an appetite for non-nutritive substances that persists for more than one month at an age when eating such objects is considered developmentally inappropriate so here's the story there was a lady here who a patient who died in 1929 and whenever they did her autopsy they found 1446 objects in her stomach things like nails and bolts and safety pins and looks like buttons and thimbles just all kinds of things that this woman had ate and was in her stomach that is absolutely wild says here that there were needles in her stomach there was a broken coat rack hook oh my gosh so originally it was thought that people did this because there was something in their diet that they weren't getting maybe they weren't getting enough iron but now we would say that this is probably more associated with an obsessive-compulsive disorder [Music] here we're looking at some psychosurgery tools and they also tell the story of a guy by the name of phineas gage who in 1848 was using dynamite to you know remove some objects and the the blast blew a steel rod through his dang head uh now this isn't the actual steel rod this is a replica but here is a picture of uh phineas gage uh he ended up surviving but a lot of his left frontal lobe was destroyed and it affected his personality and his behavior which you might expect and this was one of the the first links that was established between brain trauma and personality change [Music] what we are looking at here is a surgical table where they would perform lobotomies and dead gum look at this so this is called a trans orbital or ice pick lobotomy where the the doctor would lift up the upper eyelid and then drive this dead gum thing called an orbital clast which was a thin surgical instrument under the eyelid and to the top of the eye socket and then use a hammer to drive it through a thin layer of bone and into the brain and then it was pivoted to either side of the eye socket to sever connective tissue to the brain my gosh [Music] a lot of the patients here at the state hospital would have come in with syphilis and these are fever cabinets so you would sit in there and you would have your head poking out the top kind of like this individual right here and then there were these high wattage bulbs that would raise your body temperature to above 105 degrees and this was supposed to be a cure for syphilis kind of an uncomfortable cure i would imagine fever therapy ended up being replaced by penicillin in the late 1940s this is a concept that will probably be familiar to people just from what you might see in in movies this is ect which is electroconvulsive therapy this is something that was developed in 1938 to treat mental illness and would basically cause the the patient to have a seizure the problem is whenever they first started doing this the patient would be fully awake so there would be some some pretty painful and scary side effects yeah but anyway it it's still used to treat severe depression uh whether you realize it or not except for they put the patient under now instead of having it while you're awake but yeah interesting ah here's an artifact from the colonic irrigation room hmm this is kind of interesting uh this is the the sedative bathroom uh so this is kind of like a hydrotherapy that was used in asylums and hospitals to treat you know agitated patients so they you know the idea is that a warm bath had a soothing and relaxing quality to it and you might wonder why is this person covered up um and just has their head poking out uh well this is a piece of canvas to try and uh maintain the temperature of the water and then here they have some thermometers that were used here at this hospital this one actually makes sense to me and then they also have a cold pack treatment which would involve wrapping the patient in in cold sheets and then covering a the patient with a woolen blanket is intended to calm them here's a display showing some different types of restraints that have been used historically with mentally ill patients so you might have some that like restrain a person to a chair or maybe you have mitts to keep them from harming themselves or harming others they also had this thing right here this was a restraint cuff and you can see here's a picture of it being used so so the hands are tied with uh leather straps within this cuff um and there's still you know extreme cases today where people have to be restrained in order to keep from hurting themselves or hurting others here's the one that seems a little bit extreme and they call this early tranquilizers and it's really just a strap that you beat somebody with so somebody's having a manic episode yeah the way to get them to calm down is just to smack them with one of these things that doesn't seem effective i think that would make things a little bit worse okay uh as we're going through here i really want to be careful with something uh some of the things that we're seeing seen by today's standards quite barbaric uh but but what you have to understand and maybe have a little historic empathy for is that in a lot of cases these doctors were learning uh and they were doing the the best that they could with what they had and who knows uh 50 60 100 years from now people might look back at our era and look at how with a lot of mental health patients uh we heavily medicated them and they might look at us and say how barbaric how could they have done such a thing so anyway maybe as we're looking through this i need to have a little bit of understanding and a little bit of empathy and and kind of learn from it all right got some other interesting looking things right up here got a little television here with a whole bunch of letters stacked in it so in the fall of 1971 there was a male patient here who was observed sticking a piece of paper into the back of this tv so they they got the electrician to turn off the tv and open it up and they found 525 pieces of paper and letters stuffed into this tv the the patient had a lot of delusions uh you know he thought that the hospital was stealing his money and that his knowledge was hidden away in a couple of box cars and that he couldn't leave the hospital until all of this was exposed so we we don't know if he was storing them in the tv or if he thought he was mailing them or if he thought that the information was being transmitted through the television set but uh anyway very very interesting and here you can see an example of one of the the letters that he or one of the piece of pieces of paper that he had shoved in this tv fascinating this is pretty interesting so there was one patient here who thought that he needed to collect cigarette packs and that if he collected a hundred thousand cigarette packs uh he could exchange them for a new wheelchair for the hospital so um the these are all of the cigarette packs that he collected his life collection ended up being 108 000 cigarette packs that is a lot of smoking that was going on but on november 19th of 1969 the hospital administration presented him with a new wheelchair for the the unit as a token of appreciation for all of the hard work that he put into collecting and then here's another individual here who was really into ties so this is that person's tie collection and hey when does collecting become a disorder that feels like a personal attack [Music] okay moving into the next room and what in the heck is going on in here huh looks like somebody is being uh burned at the stake okay so so yeah i guess what they're talking about here is um how maybe in in the distant past people who had mental illnesses were maybe accused of being demon-possessed or being witches and uh were burned at the stake now again this is one of those things where i was talking about we need to have some some empathy and some understanding for the the people of history and the people of the past this is something called a utica crib so again this is another apparatus that is kind of like a cage to keep people restrained and we might look at this and say man that is just barbaric as heck and you know to put somebody in there and lock them up and that would maybe uh cause additional uh stress or agitation but there was a mentally ill patient who was quoted in a journal in 1846 who slept in one of these cribs for several days and said that he had rested better and found it useful and here's his quote he says for quote all crazy fellows as i whose spirit is willing but whose flesh is weak so this system of confinement actually gave him rest because he wouldn't get up in the middle of the night and wander around here are a few other items in this room so here they have a part of a so or some bars rather from a steel cage called a man cage that was taken from the st louis city poor house this should look familiar this is something that we commonly associate with you know restraining criminals in the town square but could also be used for uh or has been used for mental health patients you know the stocks this is a treatment that they had in the 16 and 17th century where if you had melancholy or if you had a phobia well they just put you in a bucket and blast you with uh ice cold water and then here is another restraint cage and then there's this thing right here so this is a like a giant hamster wheel um called the hollow wheel it was designed by a german psychiatrist uh named johann reel and the the idea is that it's kind of like a treadmill so they would take the the person who is you know having problems and put them in this door and lock them inside and then they could either run forward or they could run backward but you're in this giant hamster wheel all by yourself and the the idea was that you would focus on one thing for an extended period of time and it would divert your attention from you know whatever was mentally ailing you and it says here on this thing that they could be in there for 36 to 48 hours man this now this just seems cruel this is something this is a reproduction of something called a lunatic box that was sometimes called the the english booth or the coffin so this was used during the 18th and 19th centuries and the individual will be placed inside this device and had to remain in a standing position until they calmed down and then if you don't want to you know bear witness to their craziness anymore well you could just turn these screws and and drop this down to where they couldn't look out and uh you didn't have to look in but they would have to like stand in their own excrement and oh yeah awful this is something that was developed by benjamin rush who is called the father of psychiatry and this is called a tranquilizer chair so if you have somebody who is distressed or needs to become calm well you would put them in this device and their head would go in here and then their arms and legs would be strapped down and then there's a little bucket there to capture their waist and um basically you're here and they may put leeches on you or something like that or do bloodletting or you just sit there until you calm down nothing would calm me down more than being strapped to a chair and having my face covered up and people putting leeches on me here they're showing some different ways that the people have been treated in the past you know with restraints or here's some other 16th and 17th century restraining devices or here's here's another treatment how about we just get the patient down on the ground and we stomp the problems out of them dear heavens what the heck this is fascinating this is some embroidery work that was done by a woman who had schizophrenia and she was mostly mute and was hospitalized for over 30 years and this was how she communicated i guess um so it was thought for years that the the words sewn on here were um just psychotic but there was some research that was done later on and they found that this woman may have been more connected with her environment than what people originally thought wow here's something that is really interesting and kind of adds a human element to this whole place they have a lot of art displayed from the patients here at state hospital number two this is a quilt that the patients made as a gift to a nurse who was having to resign because she was having a baby and if you look here it says made by girls ward 20 january and that's 1960. they have some other pieces of art on display here so so i'm going to stop talking for a second and show some of these pieces and let them speak for themselves [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] so [Music] [Music] i think that this is a good way to kind of wrap up our time here says one in five americans are affected by mental health conditions what is the stigma it's a set of negative and often unfair beliefs that a society has about something and here's how you can help break the stigma educate yourself and others which is what we're doing here encourage others to help break the stigma see the person not the condition four telling them how common mental illness is and five talking openly about mental illness yeah this place is something else [Music] all right well that was the glor psychiatric museum right here in st joseph missouri uh i forgot to mention it's named after a guy named glor who was an employee here at the state asylum and felt passionately about educating the public and and uh you know teaching people about you know mental illness and destigmatizing it and that that place is is really really something else i i learned a lot there uh i'm not so much you know shocked at the the mental illness part as i am some of the treatments that they had but again you know people were just kind of making their way and figuring out things as best they could but uh yeah if you're ever through st joseph come to this place that that was something else [Music] we are constantly exploring and learning new things on this channel so if you found value in this video be sure to subscribe and click the notification bell to catch all of the new content when it comes out and be sure to check the links in the description for more content and opportunities from our partners

Channel: The History Underground

Views: 1,239,932

Keywords: history, history travel, history traveler, history underground, glore psychiatric museum, st. joseph missouri, missouri, mental health, mental health history, schizophrenia, museum tour, travel vlog, insane asylum, lobotomy, electroshock therapy, psychiatric drugs, psychiatric, psychiatrist, depression

Id: l5PfaALoE-c

Length: 29min 22sec (1762 seconds)

Published: Sun May 29 2022