Speaker 1: Mississippi State Hospital Museum that.
Speaker 2: We're standing in a hallway at the Mississippi State Hospital
Speaker 2: at Whitfield, one of a handful of state run residential
Speaker 2: mental health facilities still operating here. It's my first time
Speaker 2: really seeing the hospital, but I've heard about it my
Speaker 2: whole life. Everyone in Mississippi has.
Speaker 3: It was the threat that your family always gave you.
Speaker 2: If you act crazy, you'll go to Whitfield.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, people see you do that. You're going to Whitfield.
Speaker 4: If you don't behave I'm going.
Speaker 5: To take competer Whitfield.
Speaker 3: What you out?
Speaker 6: Whitfield.
Speaker 2: That's the informal name for the Mississippi State Hospital. It's
Speaker 2: been Mississippi's primary mental health facility since nineteen thirty five,
Speaker 2: when the state shuttered the old asylum in Jackson and
Speaker 2: moved those patients out here. It's that place your mom
Speaker 2: says you'll go if you don't act right, the place
Speaker 2: your friend's neighbor got sent. It has mythic status in Mississippi.
Speaker 2: But standing here in a marble room full of outdated
Speaker 2: therapy equipment, wod Field's not scary. It's quaint, at least
Speaker 2: in the museum. Hard to say how much of that
Speaker 2: is because of our tour guides, Donna Brown and Kathy Denton.
Speaker 2: These two have been here for decades and know everything
Speaker 2: about the place. Donna took the lead with Kathy chiming in.
Speaker 2: I noticed a black and white photo of a woman
Speaker 2: in what looks like a shower.
Speaker 3: The lady in the shower.
Speaker 5: They had to pencil in Panny and broad hard cuf
Speaker 5: it was pornography for nineteen thirty eight.
Speaker 2: It's a quirky museum. There's a display of patient run
Speaker 2: newspapers and literary magazines, and then around the corner posters
Speaker 2: for movies were Whitfield makes a cameo, including the Sandra
Speaker 2: Bullet classic A Time to Kill.
Speaker 4: The scene in the movie where she breaks into the
Speaker 4: psychiatrist's office was filmed in the building that you passed
Speaker 4: on the way to this one and.
Speaker 5: The Beast within.
Speaker 4: You watch a lot of it on YouTube, but you're
Speaker 4: going to recognize very little of the hospital. There's a
Speaker 4: lot of screaming and running and dark.
Speaker 2: Part of the museum is housed in one of what
Speaker 2: Field's old hydrotherapy units. Hydrotherapy basically means using water as
Speaker 2: medical treatment for physical or mental health. If you ever
Speaker 2: taken a dip at a spa, you've had hydrotherapy.
Speaker 7: Today you can go the spa.
Speaker 5: They'll wrap you in mud, sand, alojl seaweed, coffee grounds, tea, leave.
Speaker 3: Salt, sugar.
Speaker 5: The most expensive one I've found is Pink Indie in
Speaker 5: sand in New Orleans, twelve hundred dollars forty five minutes.
Speaker 2: Back in the day, it was on the bleeding edge
Speaker 2: of mental health care, Woodfield hydrotherapy, and it consisted of
Speaker 2: several rooms of white marble from the floor all the
Speaker 2: way up to the ceiling, and the kind of porcelain
Speaker 2: sinks and claw footed tubs that an HGTV host would.
Speaker 7: Kill for hydro therapy does.
Speaker 5: Now, this is by far the treatment of choice. Just
Speaker 5: a long soak and a big old back, yeah big.
Speaker 2: But other hydrotherapy practices were more brutal than relaxing.
Speaker 5: Now, this is a needle spray shower or a Scotch shower.
Speaker 5: He's one of these nozzles. Control the jet of the
Speaker 5: water cold here, hot, here, back and forth. The doctor
Speaker 5: would literally write a prescription. The patient would come in,
Speaker 5: go to the center, hold on to the bars.
Speaker 7: She would start spraying the formula. See the petals.
Speaker 5: They're not here today, but at control of the intensity
Speaker 5: via water.
Speaker 2: If you've seen one flew over the cuckoo's nest, it's
Speaker 2: easy to imagine a sadistic nurse ratchet gleefully blasting patients
Speaker 2: into submission. But the first antipsychotic drug wasn't introduced until
Speaker 2: the nineteen fifties, nearly one hundred years after Mississippi opened
Speaker 2: its original State asylum. Donna tells us that the doctors
Speaker 2: of that era really believed that this was an effective treatment.
Speaker 2: Donna waved us toward another room. This one was almost
Speaker 2: like a grotto with a big slab smack dab in
Speaker 2: the middle like an altar. That's where the patients would
Speaker 2: be placed.
Speaker 7: This is a wet pag treatment.
Speaker 5: When he came, he was very many, very fidgetive. They
Speaker 5: wanted to calm him down, so they wrapped him in
Speaker 5: sheets as tind as they could, much like a swaddled baby.
Speaker 5: Got him on the table, hot and cold water faucetsteads soaking.
Speaker 2: Now, before we exit the hydrotherapy unit, Donna reads us.
Speaker 5: Upon meditation and hydrotherapy, Theodore Rothkey six hours a day,
Speaker 5: I lay me down within this tub that cannot drown.
Speaker 5: Within this primal element, the flesh is willing to repent.
Speaker 5: I do not laugh, I do not cry. I'm sweating
Speaker 5: out the will to die. My past is sliding.
Speaker 3: Down the drain.
Speaker 5: I soon will be myself again.
Speaker 2: I wish Theodore ret Key were still around, because I'd
Speaker 2: love to ask him about that last line. Is it
Speaker 2: sarcastic or did he really feel like an ice bath
Speaker 2: restored his sanity? Was he just hoping that it would.
Speaker 2: The more I've listen, the more I hear irony, and
Speaker 2: I soon will be myself again. But maybe that's because
Speaker 2: of the place asylums have come to occupy in my
Speaker 2: or really in the American imagination. It's a place of
Speaker 2: broken promises. You're supposed to get better, but in most
Speaker 2: stories I've read, most movies I've seen, the opposite happens.
Speaker 2: Maybe that's why they's such a popular setting for horror films.
Speaker 2: That may be the narrative we have today, but it's
Speaker 2: not the one the asylum started with. The promise of
Speaker 2: the Old Asylum was that it was a place for healing,
Speaker 2: But over one third of the patients who passed through
Speaker 2: the Old asylum's doors died within them.
Speaker 8: The popular narrative is that it was great when it
Speaker 8: started out and then it just went downhill. The true narrative,
Speaker 8: I think, is just a much more complicated than that.
Speaker 2: So how exactly did this promise break? I'm Larison Campbell
Speaker 2: in This is under Yazuklay. When word got out back
Speaker 2: in twenty twelve that thousands of bodies had been found
Speaker 2: at the site of Mississippi's Old Asylum, the news spread fast.
Speaker 3: This is the University of Mississippi Medical Center.
Speaker 1: Its campus is home to six health science schools, more
Speaker 1: than three thousand students, and thousands of unmarked graves.
Speaker 6: It hit that viral sweet spot.
Speaker 2: A horror movie and one headline not just confirming our
Speaker 2: dark expectations but exceeding them. It's death and drama in
Speaker 2: the Old South and a lunatic asylum all bald into one.
Speaker 7: What ends up is the Southern Gothic, the terrain of terror.
Speaker 2: That's Mab Secrest. Southern scholar and historical author. Mab spent
Speaker 2: more than fifteen years researching and studying Georgia's Millageville Asylum.
Speaker 2: Because this isn't just a Mississippi story. Any states had
Speaker 2: asylums in and out of the South. But the terrain
Speaker 2: of terror that mAbs describing, that's not the way things
Speaker 2: started out for our old asylum.
Speaker 7: Starts off is a story about Enlightenment optimism, and it
Speaker 7: starts in Europe, and it comes to this country.
Speaker 2: That enlightenment, she mentions, is the Enlightenment, that glowing moment
Speaker 2: of philosophy and reason in Europe between the seventeenth and
Speaker 2: nineteenth centuries. Eventually, these ideals made their way across the pond.
Speaker 2: Until people were enlightened. Society's primary solution for dealing with
Speaker 2: severe mental illness was simple isolation or restraint, sometimes both.
Speaker 2: That could mean the family home behind a locked door
Speaker 2: in a back room, or if you're a first wife
Speaker 2: of Victorian literature, in the attic. For those whose families
Speaker 2: couldn't care for them, there were public almshouses and the
Speaker 2: county jail. How far we've come. Physical restraints were common,
Speaker 2: sanitation standards non existent. Dungeons were a real thing. The
Speaker 2: goal here separate the ill person.
Speaker 6: From the non ill community.
Speaker 2: But as Enlightenment ideas called on, as medicine and science
Speaker 2: became more robust, doctors began to argue that mental illness
Speaker 2: was a problem society could actually solve.
Speaker 9: Doctors start to believe that you can heal the troubled
Speaker 9: mind if you change the environment, and if you put
Speaker 9: them in a beautiful place. Then you give them doctors
Speaker 9: who pay attention and listen to them, you give them
Speaker 9: good nutrition, you give them a beautiful setting, and you
Speaker 9: give them some occupational therapy.
Speaker 7: Then they'll get better. It's called the moral therapy.
Speaker 9: But you could cure people about changing structures, which is
Speaker 9: a very progressive idea, and you know, can really cure
Speaker 9: insanity with these different hospitals.
Speaker 2: It was a revolutionary idea. Change a person's outside environment
Speaker 2: and they'll change internally. But in practical terms, what does
Speaker 2: the infrastructure of calm quietude look like? In the eighteen forties,
Speaker 2: a physician in Philadelphia came up with an.
Speaker 8: Answer, Thomas Kirkbride, who was a psychiatrist who was very
Speaker 8: devoted to taking care of people with mental health issues.
Speaker 8: And you know, it's this whole idea that if you
Speaker 8: just get away from the normal pressures of life and
Speaker 8: have a little time to breathe and to enjoy the
Speaker 8: fresh air and to be taken care of, then you'll
Speaker 8: get better and you can return to life as a
Speaker 8: normal citizen.
Speaker 2: That was Leida Gibson, coordinator of the Asylum Hill Project.
Speaker 2: Thomas Kirkbride would later formalize his plan into a magnum
Speaker 2: opus with a title on the Construction, Organization and General
Speaker 2: Arrangements of Hospitals for the Insane, with some remarks on
Speaker 2: insanity and its treatment.
Speaker 6: He was specific.
Speaker 2: The plan included exact staff numbers, roles, and even salaries.
Speaker 2: He drew up measurements for rooms and windows and the
Speaker 2: space between windows down to the inch.
Speaker 3: The kirkbry Plan.
Speaker 8: The idea was that you had to have a certain
Speaker 8: amount of cubic feet of air space in order to
Speaker 8: get well. These were rooms with really tall ceilings. They
Speaker 8: had huge windows. The patients could open the windows and
Speaker 8: you'll notice from the plan there's a haul down the
Speaker 8: middle and then every room on every side has a window.
Speaker 8: People had their own rooms when it first started. I
Speaker 8: mean this would be like a luxurious dorm room.
Speaker 7: It called on.
Speaker 2: The first was in Trenton, New Jersey. Other states followed.
Speaker 2: The Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum was one of the first
Speaker 2: dozen in the country. In the first Kirkbright Hospital in
Speaker 2: the Deep South. Just to ground you in the timeline
Speaker 2: real quick. The Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum opened its doors
Speaker 2: in eighteen fifty five. It had taken five years to
Speaker 2: complete at a cost of one hundred and seventy five
Speaker 2: thousand dollars. That's about seven million in today's money. If
Speaker 2: this level of benevolence and generosity for Mississippians with mental
Speaker 2: illness seems out of character for a state government whose
Speaker 2: focus was keeping slavery legal, don't worry. The decision to
Speaker 2: build this asylum to look after a quote less fortunate
Speaker 2: Mississippians does not buck the narrative you've come to know.
Speaker 2: Let's say it's the eighteen fifties. You're a Mississippi lawmaker
Speaker 2: trying to put a shine on an image badly tarnished
Speaker 2: by I don't know, your refusal to stop treating humans
Speaker 2: like chattel. Maybe investing in this monument to those Enlightenment
Speaker 2: ideals of individual liberty natural rights in the social contract
Speaker 2: starts to seem like a good way to thumb your
Speaker 2: nose all those Yankees crying about the immorality of slavery,
Speaker 2: a sort of see we're not all bad.
Speaker 8: Perhaps It's not so pointed in the institutional records, but
Speaker 8: you read between the lines and you say, you know,
Speaker 8: look at what we do for those unfortunates among us.
Speaker 3: They did not use the words.
Speaker 8: That would be that would be acceptable today, but and
Speaker 8: this became something that they could point to.
Speaker 3: This was the most.
Speaker 8: Impressive structure in the state that remained after the Civil War.
Speaker 8: This was sort of a monument to the goodness of
Speaker 8: Mississippi leaders.
Speaker 2: And that's exactly what a nurse named Dorothea Dix was
Speaker 2: banking on. Probably heard her name before, because Dicks almost
Speaker 2: single handedly created the first generation of state asylums in
Speaker 2: the eighteen forties. Dorothea Dix turned Kirkbride's asylum plan into
Speaker 2: something of a road show, lobbying state legislatures in the
Speaker 2: North and the South to build these hospitals.
Speaker 7: Reading about Dorothea Dix was very instructive to me on
Speaker 7: the relationships of mental hospitals in the South versus the
Speaker 7: North in an environment of growing abolition.
Speaker 2: She began her career as a teacher, but on March
Speaker 2: twenty eighth, eighteen forty one, the thirty five year old
Speaker 2: went to teach a Sunday school class at East Cambridge
Speaker 2: House of Corrections in Massachusetts. There she found groups of
Speaker 2: women experiencing psychiatric conditions. They were chained in dirty, unheated cells.
Speaker 2: Many had never committed a crime but were locked up
Speaker 2: with violent felons. They'd been starved, tortured, and sexually assaulted.
Speaker 2: From that day forward, she became a tireless advocate for
Speaker 2: better treatment for people with mental illness.
Speaker 7: And Dorothea Dix is one of the heroines of the
Speaker 7: humane treatment of insane people and institutions, especially this Kirkbride model,
Speaker 7: which was supposed to kind of separate out and bring
Speaker 7: them in, and it's a whole architecture of sanity in
Speaker 7: that way.
Speaker 2: In Mississippi, she presented the state legislature with the findings
Speaker 2: from a study she'd done. She told them how Mississippians
Speaker 2: with mental illness were living in poverty and all alone,
Speaker 2: often quote chained in closets and attics, in jails or dungeons.
Speaker 2: Mississippi lawmakers were blown away. They appropriated the full amount
Speaker 2: requested fifty thousand dollars for the construction of a new
Speaker 2: state asylum, and then they made their first mistake because
Speaker 2: they picked a site right at the thickest part of
Speaker 2: that Yazoo clay. The foundation was laid and then relayed,
Speaker 2: more building delays, more structural problems. The Mississippi State Lunatic
Speaker 2: Asylum finally opened its doors, more than one hundred and
Speaker 2: twenty five thousand dollars over that initial budget. But it
Speaker 2: was a beautiful neoclassical building with a thirty five foot
Speaker 2: tall portico supported by six doric columns visible all the
Speaker 2: way down to Fortification Street about a mile away. It
Speaker 2: had a capacity for two hundred and fifty patients. Remember
Speaker 2: that number. The grandiosity of the architecture speaks to the
Speaker 2: grand plans Mississippi.
Speaker 6: Had for the place.
Speaker 2: This wasn't a warehouse for the community's problems. Warehouses don't
Speaker 2: get columns and kubolas. This was a place that would
Speaker 2: cure people. After all. This was the era of rapidly
Speaker 2: evolving medical treatment. In the nineteenth century, Doctors began to
Speaker 2: link dirt and filth with disease. Cities began installing sewage
Speaker 2: and sanitation systems. Germs themselves still hadn't been discovered, but
Speaker 2: concepts of germ theory were there. A smallpox vaccine, Cholera's
Speaker 2: connection to contaminated water. Science was beginning to conquer physical maladies,
Speaker 2: why should disease of the mind be any different. There's
Speaker 2: something else we haven't told you about Dorothea Dix, something
Speaker 2: that probably helped her connect with lawmakers in the Antebellum South.
Speaker 7: She in fact is very, i would say viryingly anti
Speaker 7: black racist. Dorothya Dix didn't link black people, and she
Speaker 7: thought that insane people were treated with some black people.
Speaker 7: So Southern legislators loved her.
Speaker 2: And when black patients were admitted, their quality of care
Speaker 2: was substantially lower.
Speaker 8: Sod they were initially a separate wing for the black patients,
Speaker 8: and then very quickly they built annexes off the back
Speaker 8: that were three stories as well. But you know, obviously
Speaker 8: they weren't as big and spacious as the initial.
Speaker 2: Structure, meaning these facilities for the black patients. They never
Speaker 2: even tried to adhere to the Kirkbride plan, which was
Speaker 2: the whole reason the asylum was built in the first place.
Speaker 2: In order for the quote curative properties of the Kirkbride
Speaker 2: model to work, the patients need physical space, big private rooms,
Speaker 2: fresh air, careful attention from doctors and nurses, and if
Speaker 2: patients aren't recovering enough to be released. It creates a
Speaker 2: backlog crowding, and then even the patients who could have
Speaker 2: been helped by the Kirkbride plan no longer getting better.
Speaker 2: Part of the reason for the overcrowding many of the
Speaker 2: people living and dying at the Old Asylum weren't mentally ill.
Speaker 2: That's after the break. The largest art museum in the state,
Speaker 2: the Mississippi Museum of Art, connects Mississippi to the world
Speaker 2: and the power of art to the power of community.
Speaker 2: Located in downtown Jackson, the museum's permanent collection is free
Speaker 2: to the public. National and international exhibitions rotate throughout the year,
Speaker 2: allowing visitors to experience works from around the world. The
Speaker 2: gardens at Expansive Lawn at the Mississippi Museum of Art
Speaker 2: are home to art installations in a variety of events
Speaker 2: for all ages. Plan your visit today at MS museumart
Speaker 2: dot org.
Speaker 6: That's MS Museum art dot org.
Speaker 7: This right here is very interesting.
Speaker 5: It's a register for the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum.
Speaker 2: While at the Woodfield Museum, my producer Rebecca and I
Speaker 2: came across a giant ledger easily five inches thick with
Speaker 2: hundreds of pages. Each page was a list of names,
Speaker 2: then census details like gender, age, race, written in neat cursive,
Speaker 2: along with the reason each patient was admitted.
Speaker 3: Oh, oh ill.
Speaker 10: Health, menopause, Yes, PMS is in here somewhere, okay, agree,
Speaker 10: fright a couplet?
Speaker 2: Religion, Yeah, grief, fright, PMS, religion. These were some of
Speaker 2: the causes for institutionalization noted during patient intakes. With so
Speaker 2: many possible reasons for admission, maybe it's no surprise that
Speaker 2: the place got overcrowded.
Speaker 8: Yes, So the Kirkbright Plan in general, and certainly the
Speaker 8: institution in Mississippi was established for those people who could
Speaker 8: be cured. It was never meant as a place to
Speaker 8: where people would live out their lives, but there were
Speaker 8: no other options. So what do you do with somebody
Speaker 8: who is having epileptic seizures all day long? What do
Speaker 8: you do with people who are never going to get better?
Speaker 8: And you know, this idea that people who had been
Speaker 8: dethroned of reason were the only people that this institution
Speaker 8: could serve was just not realistic from the beginning. And
Speaker 8: I think that's the popular narrative that they just said,
Speaker 8: you know, okay, We're going to just become everything to
Speaker 8: all these people who need different things. They simply were
Speaker 8: reacting to the situation at the time. And you know,
Speaker 8: in a couple of the reports, people say, what are
Speaker 8: we supposed to do when people show up at the door?
Speaker 8: Are we supposed to just leave them out on the streets?
Speaker 8: And so there were a lot of people who were
Speaker 8: accepted in the asylum, and there was an acknowledgement that
Speaker 8: they weren't going to get better. So the philosophy never
Speaker 8: really changed. It was simply that they had to deal
Speaker 8: with the cards they were dealt.
Speaker 2: One of the cards Mississippi got dealt a disease called palagra.
Speaker 2: You heard about it from Wayne Lee the grave Delzer.
Speaker 2: It's that nutritional deficiency that killed his grandfather.
Speaker 11: He wasn't crazy, he was just starving.
Speaker 8: I mean, I had never even heard of palagra before.
Speaker 8: So palagor was a nutritional deficiency that just swept the Southeast.
Speaker 3: Starting at about nineteen ten.
Speaker 8: And it's characterized by what they call the four d's, dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia,
Speaker 8: death in that order, people from all walks of life
Speaker 8: would come down with palagra. Of course, the dementia wasn't
Speaker 8: apparent until close to the end, so many many patients,
Speaker 8: especially those from the Delta, were admitted with polagra, and
Speaker 8: in the institutional reports they talk about, you know, by
Speaker 8: the time they get here, it's too late to do anything.
Speaker 2: Palagora was not only an epidemic for decades, it remained
Speaker 2: a medical mystery with.
Speaker 6: A geographic preference the Southeast.
Speaker 2: By the late nineteen thirties, three million Americans total had
Speaker 2: contracted palagora, most of them Southerners. Mississippi was ground zero
Speaker 2: of the Palagora epidemic, which is why a doctor named
Speaker 2: Joseph Goldberger headed there to study it in nineteen fourteen.
Speaker 2: Doctor Goldberger was a physician with the US Hygienic Laboratory,
Speaker 2: the progenitor of today's National Institutes of Health.
Speaker 8: So he did an experiment with prisoners the Rankin County Penitentiary.
Speaker 8: These were quote volunteers who were then fed a very
Speaker 8: specific diet, and they were able to understand that pelagra
Speaker 8: came from this niais and deficiency.
Speaker 2: See Mississippi's old Asylum. Might have begun life in the
Speaker 2: wealthiest state in the country, but by the nineteen twenties,
Speaker 2: Mississippi had assumed a position. We're all familiar with the country's.
Speaker 8: Poorest, because if you look at the old pictures of
Speaker 8: the you know of sharecroppers on the farms in the Delta,
Speaker 8: that cotton is planted right up to the shacks. Because
Speaker 8: they wanted to use every inch of land for cotton. Instead,
Speaker 8: they stopped growing their own vegetables and raising hogs or
Speaker 8: raising cattle or anything like that, and they bought everything
Speaker 8: from the company's store. I think it's like fat back
Speaker 8: and molasses.
Speaker 2: Southern doctors found Goldberger's evidence offensive. I mean, here is
Speaker 2: this Jewish doctor from New York City parachuting in just
Speaker 2: to embarrass a whole region by calling them poor. Goldberger
Speaker 2: had figured out that brewers yeast, the stuff you used
Speaker 2: to make beer, could send Pelagora packing, but his solution
Speaker 2: wouldn't be implemented at any scale until years later. During
Speaker 2: one of the greatest natural disasters in US history, the
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty seven Mississippi River floods, hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 2: people lost their homes.
Speaker 6: Tent cities sprung up along.
Speaker 2: Levees from Memphis all the way down to Louisiana, and
Speaker 2: off of Goldberger's advice, the Red Cross began adding brewers
Speaker 2: yas to its food rations.
Speaker 8: And that's why we have enriched foods. Now, that's what
Speaker 8: it means. The advent of enriched foods was from Polagora.
Speaker 2: This understanding of Pelagora progression complicates the narrative we're inclined
Speaker 2: to jump to when it comes to the Old Asylum.
Speaker 8: I know that a lot of the work that's been
Speaker 8: done on asylums in the South in general assumes that
Speaker 8: patients came to the asylums and were not fed well
Speaker 8: and got poleegra at the asylum and then ended up
Speaker 8: dying at polegra.
Speaker 3: I think the story is much.
Speaker 2: Different, counterintuitively, in terms of preventative medicine AKAA diet, the
Speaker 2: Old Asylum might have been one of the better places
Speaker 2: in the state.
Speaker 6: Stay with me here.
Speaker 2: The asylums thirteen hundred acres included a farm, and it
Speaker 2: wasn't just any old thing. It was an award winner
Speaker 2: one that people came from all around just to see.
Speaker 8: They raised cattle, They had an award winning hog operation,
Speaker 8: award winning poultry operation. And my feeling is that patients
Speaker 8: may have been better fed at the asylum than they
Speaker 8: were at their homes.
Speaker 2: You see the farm's bounty laid out and the superintendent's
Speaker 2: by annual reports to the legislature, which, to be fair,
Speaker 2: we're always trying to paint the asylum in the best
Speaker 2: possible light. Still, between June of nineteen eleven and July
Speaker 2: of nineteen thirteen, which was just a couple of years
Speaker 2: before doctor Goldberger was sent down to Mississippi, the vegetable
Speaker 2: garden alone spanned about sixty acres. All of this maintained,
Speaker 2: of course by the patients themselves, but many palagor patients
Speaker 2: arrived too far gone for diet to do much.
Speaker 8: Good, and so the death rate for people with pelagora
Speaker 8: was just incredible. I think it's a condemnation of sort
Speaker 8: of the Mississippi society rather than the asylum itself.
Speaker 2: The death rate for pollagora won is incredible. I mean,
Speaker 2: we've got it. It wiped out entire swaths of the South.
Speaker 2: And we've also got a handle on the four d's,
Speaker 2: the last two of which are dementia and death. Collagrapatients
Speaker 2: who were sent to the asylum were already on death's
Speaker 2: door when they arrived.
Speaker 6: Now overlay this.
Speaker 2: Information with the asylum's high death rates with patients days
Speaker 2: of just a few months before those patients passed. To
Speaker 2: be clear, I'm not saying that the Old Asylum was
Speaker 2: a rose tinged haven altruistic to its core.
Speaker 6: Neither is Laida.
Speaker 8: There were people who committed suicide, and there were people
Speaker 8: who were victims of violent patient on patient violence. I
Speaker 8: am absolutely positive there were patients who are victims of
Speaker 8: sexual violence of by the caregivers. I'm not saying that
Speaker 8: didn't happen. I'm saying if we only focus on that,
Speaker 8: we miss a lot of the story.
Speaker 2: This context really complicated my understanding of the Old Asylum
Speaker 2: in a lot of ways, intentionally or not. The asylum
Speaker 2: was more like a hospice for many of its patients.
Speaker 2: You can't just draw a straight line from the high
Speaker 2: death rates to mistreatment, poor medical care, poor treatment. Those
Speaker 2: things happened, but there's zigzags along the way.
Speaker 8: And I say thirty thousand patients approximately and about ten
Speaker 8: thousand died based on the institutional records, and then twenty
Speaker 8: five hundred patients were there when Whitfield opened, so that
Speaker 8: means that seventeen thousand, five hundred patients approximately.
Speaker 3: Were treated and released. We never hear those stories.
Speaker 8: I mean, I've run across maybe a couple of stories
Speaker 8: about oh yeah, my great uncle went there, was at
Speaker 8: the Old Asylum for a little while, and then he
Speaker 8: came home and he was fine.
Speaker 3: You know. I mean, we just don't get those stories.
Speaker 2: There's no way for us to know why those stories
Speaker 2: didn't get passed down. Could be its shame, or could
Speaker 2: be it's just too mundane to enter the family lore.
Speaker 2: I mean, I can't imagine sitting my kids down to
Speaker 2: tell them about their great uncle's time and physical therapy
Speaker 2: and maybe those success stories or what helped family members
Speaker 2: at the time make peace with the choice to send
Speaker 2: their loved ones to the Old Asylum, because remember, patients
Speaker 2: were rarely the ones admitting themselves. Somewhere along the line,
Speaker 2: someone made the decision that they were better off in
Speaker 2: the asylum. Maybe it was law enforcement, the judicial system,
Speaker 2: or maybe it was family members grasping its straws.
Speaker 8: I hear that a lot often people were admitted to
Speaker 8: the asylum because they were a danger to themselves or others.
Speaker 8: There's several stories about people setting fire to the house,
Speaker 8: and you know, you think about it, people go, well,
Speaker 8: why was fire such a big deal, like well, because
Speaker 8: that was the way houses were heated, and that was.
Speaker 3: The way, that was the way people cooked.
Speaker 8: The danger of sort of being alone in a household
Speaker 8: when there's something going on with your mind with a
Speaker 8: lot worse than probably than it is now. I do
Speaker 8: think it comes down to can I handle this, It's
Speaker 8: this in the best interest of my loved one to
Speaker 8: keep this person at home or in the community. Is
Speaker 8: it simply a way to marginalize the people that we
Speaker 8: don't want to look at in our community. Possibly. I mean,
Speaker 8: all of these things I think are at play. I
Speaker 8: do hate the word marginalized though, and I'll tell you why. Yes,
Speaker 8: people were sent to the asylum. We are looking at
Speaker 8: that from our perspective. Though, again, they came to the asylum.
Speaker 8: At least initially, it was a place where there were resources.
Speaker 8: There was food, There was even entertainment. There were sidewalks
Speaker 8: and landscaping and plants. The patients there, their lives didn't end,
Speaker 8: you know, they simply entered into a new community.
Speaker 2: Regardless of why patients ended up in the asylum, their
Speaker 2: lives didn't end when they walked through those doors.
Speaker 6: They just changed.
Speaker 2: To find those examples you just have to dig below
Speaker 2: the surface that's coming up on under yazoo clay.
Speaker 7: So this is the soil that is getting sucked.
Speaker 3: In, Yes, the famous clay.
Speaker 7: Oh yes, yes, it's terrible.
Speaker 11: It's terrible, terrible dirt.
Speaker 2: But we're in a building on the Medical Center's campus
Speaker 2: that feels more like a warehouse. It's at least fifteen
Speaker 2: degrees colder than Jackson's April weather outside, and there's burnt
Speaker 2: orange yazoo clay all over the cement floor, burnt orange
Speaker 2: yazoo clay all over everything.
Speaker 6: Oh wow, Oh, this is not what I was expecting
Speaker 6: at all.
Speaker 11: No, because so for one thing, it's very dirty because
Speaker 11: it's an active archaeological field lab. But it was originally
Speaker 11: the laundry building for the hospital, and that's why all
Speaker 11: the big pipes and the giant boilers in the corner.
Speaker 2: We're here to meet doctor Jennifer Mack. You heard from
Speaker 2: her briefly in the first episode. She's the lead bioarchaeologist
Speaker 2: of the Asylum Hill Project. Just in case you, like me,
Speaker 2: are fuzzy on what that means.
Speaker 11: Bioarchaeology is the study specifically of human remains from archaeological
Speaker 11: contexts this is specifically the study of bear.
Speaker 2: Essentially, doctor Mack is small and wiry. She has long,
Speaker 2: dark hair, and, despite the gravity of her job, a
Speaker 2: light goofy sense of humor. We spoke inside, but it's
Speaker 2: easy to picture her out in the field. Since twenty seventeen,
Speaker 2: she's been elbowed deep and yazoo clay, working to map
Speaker 2: out the cemetery and piece together the story of the
Speaker 2: asylum it belonged to.
Speaker 11: It's easier for people to identify when there are a
Speaker 11: few artifacts, to tell a little bit about a person's
Speaker 11: personality and really be like, oh yeah, I got totally.
Speaker 3: I know that chick.
Speaker 2: She walked us over to a series of folding tables
Speaker 2: covered with brown paper. It looked like the setup for
Speaker 2: a crawfish boil, but she'd use the paper to protect
Speaker 2: artifacts she'd pulled for us.
Speaker 11: I cover everything because the air conditioning a heat blows
Speaker 11: so hard and then blows dust over everything.
Speaker 2: The covering was totally a practical choice on Doctor Max's part.
Speaker 2: It's the only to keep that yazoo clay dust from
Speaker 2: taking over again, but the effect paid for a delightful reveal.
Speaker 2: With each new object we came to, she picked up.
Speaker 6: A tiny bit of gold.
Speaker 11: Oh look, there's a gold nugget. Why would there be
Speaker 11: such a tiny gold with the filling survived without the
Speaker 11: truth around it.
Speaker 2: As they peel back each layer of clay, doctor Mack
Speaker 2: and her team are exposing new insights into the people
Speaker 2: that were laid to rest in these graves and the
Speaker 2: people who entered them into life at the asylum.
Speaker 11: I'd love to tell you about one particular pattern that
Speaker 11: delights me, though it's not about the patients. Individuals were
Speaker 11: wrapped in a winding sheet that was pinned, and so
Speaker 11: we usually find two, three, four safety pins in a burial.
Speaker 11: There's a set of graves with why in my head,
Speaker 11: I call her like the compulsive nurse, someone who for
Speaker 11: a short time was preparing bodies for burial, was very
Speaker 11: finicky about the winding sheets. So instead of three or
Speaker 11: four pins, there as many as eighteen safety pins, and
Speaker 11: you could that is a personality. That's not a policy change, obviously,
Speaker 11: it's a personality.
Speaker 3: There are five graves in a row that.
Speaker 11: Have way too many pins, and then.
Speaker 3: There are a few nearby.
Speaker 11: There's a total of ten that I presume were prepared
Speaker 11: by this same individual and then it stops, and we've
Speaker 11: gone pretty far out we have not found anymore.
Speaker 3: So either that person was.
Speaker 1: No longer asked to prepare bodies for burial, or someone said, hey,
Speaker 1: quit wasting all the pins. You know, I'm not sure,
Speaker 1: but we have this little glimpse of one personality of
Speaker 1: a person who either worked at the asylum or could
Speaker 1: have been a fellow patient.
Speaker 2: The only part of the old asylum that's left on
Speaker 2: Asylum Hill is the cemetery, and there's little to no documentation.
Speaker 6: Of or about these burials.
Speaker 2: So the story of the cemetery is being plucked from
Speaker 2: the clay grave by grave and peace by piece.
Speaker 11: As far as we know, we haven't had any sort
Speaker 11: of documents, but of course it's early days in research.
Speaker 11: We haven't had any oral histories about families being able
Speaker 11: to attend the burial but not able to claim the body.
Speaker 11: So my interpretation has been more that patients and staff
Speaker 11: prepairing the bodies or doing the work of the actual
Speaker 11: burial are the ones who had these expressions of affection.
Speaker 2: Because we do have each item that doctor Mack reveals
Speaker 2: beneath the butcher paper is something she and her team
Speaker 2: have found while conducting the dig of the cemetery. That
Speaker 2: means that each item was intentionally left with someone in
Speaker 2: their final resting place.
Speaker 11: See it's got the ribs on the back. And this
Speaker 11: was found in Burial one fifty seven, right above where
Speaker 11: the kaffer had had decayed.
Speaker 2: She's showing us a piece of broken tile more than
Speaker 2: a foot long.
Speaker 11: We're pretty sure we know where the tile came from
Speaker 11: in the nineteen twenty three superintendent's report that there's a
Speaker 11: description of having remodeled all of the bathrooms in the
Speaker 11: asylum and replaced all the tile. So what's it doing
Speaker 11: in the burial well? I had a thought.
Speaker 2: She brought that thought to the descendant, doctor Elizabeth West.
Speaker 2: Doctor West also has an impressive CV. She's a member
Speaker 2: of the Asylum Hill Research Consortium and also the director
Speaker 2: of academics for Georgia State University's Center for Studies on
Speaker 2: Africa and Its Diaspora.
Speaker 11: And so I spoke with Elizabeth West, and it was
Speaker 11: her opinion that she thought it could indeed be like
Speaker 11: an adaptive expression of the African American mortuary tradition of
Speaker 11: placing ceramic or glass domestic items in the coffin or
Speaker 11: on top of the coffin at burial. And the reason
Speaker 11: this is so interesting is that the nature of this
Speaker 11: being a big piece of broken tile instead of like
Speaker 11: a lovely cup and saucer sort of suggests that patients
Speaker 11: were involved in the work of doing the grave digging
Speaker 11: and burying the dead. Because if you're a patient and
Speaker 11: an asylum, you can't go to the cafeteria and say, hey,
Speaker 11: I'd like a cup and saucer to bury with my friend.
Speaker 11: I don't think that would go over well. But you
Speaker 11: can take what you can find, just like enslaved people
Speaker 11: made use of what they could and use that to
Speaker 11: express the same thing. So it's a maked solution. When
Speaker 11: other materials aren't available and we've got this tile, we
Speaker 11: have an another piece of tile that was found in
Speaker 11: another grave. There was a broken crockery vessel in another grave,
Speaker 11: and then a large rested can in another, so that
Speaker 11: we found this pattern so far of objects that you
Speaker 11: could have pulled off of a discard pile. Looked very
Speaker 11: much like it had been placed there as it was
Speaker 11: it was being pulled up by the back.
Speaker 3: Ho h.
Speaker 6: I love this.
Speaker 2: It's what doctor Didlake has been talking about that Southern
Speaker 2: ethos that reverence for the grave has been with the
Speaker 2: cemetery from the beginning.
Speaker 11: Sometimes it is just an empty medicine bodel and a spoon.
Speaker 11: It doesn't have to be something elaborate. But I would
Speaker 11: think that if it was family coming from outside, it
Speaker 11: wouldn't be a broken piece of building material from the asylum.
Speaker 2: Doctor mack leads us over to a pair of brown
Speaker 2: shoes that look almost like they've been sculpted from dirt.
Speaker 11: So these were ye, there were alongside the body, and
Speaker 11: my interpretation is that it was an item that was
Speaker 11: almost forgotten during the burial preparation. The body is already
Speaker 11: pinned up in the winding sheet, placed in the coffin,
Speaker 11: and oh wait, we forgot to put the boots on
Speaker 11: the feet. Oh these were his favorite boots. Let's not
Speaker 11: forget these. So they were placed in the coffin because
Speaker 11: it was important to the people who were doing the
Speaker 11: burial to do that proper thing. But then couldn't access
Speaker 11: the feet anymore. At least that's my theory, because.
Speaker 2: She said she's also found dentures tucked inside the same way.
Speaker 11: You can't reopen grandma's mouth, but you can make sure
Speaker 11: she doesn't go to heaven without her dentures.
Speaker 2: But sometimes the value of the objects doesn't require so
Speaker 2: much guesswork.
Speaker 11: These rings are more like what we commonly find, and
Speaker 11: we have found a lot of thought, but rings are
Speaker 11: the most common personal artifact that we find.
Speaker 2: She holds up a gold ring. I lean in and
Speaker 2: notice there's an inscription.
Speaker 11: This is one of my favorite artifacts. It appears to
Speaker 11: be a solid gold wedding bands our eighteen carrot gold
Speaker 11: wedding band, and inscribed inside it says ever true to
Speaker 11: the which is very sweet. And even though it's a
Speaker 11: small ring, based on the width of thinking that it
Speaker 11: was on the hand of a male, but unfortunately the
Speaker 11: skeletal remains were almost non existent in this grave. And
Speaker 11: I really like this artifact, not just because to me,
Speaker 11: I feel like it's a symbol of a truly loving marriage,
Speaker 11: because if you're just having to marry somebody, you don't
Speaker 11: get that engraved in a ring, right, or maybe you do,
Speaker 11: but also because it combats the assumption that people make that, oh,
Speaker 11: everyone who worked in the asylum was evil and they
Speaker 11: would have stolen anything valuable that the patients had. Obviously
Speaker 11: that's not the case, because this is a very valuable
Speaker 11: ring that got interred with this person.
Speaker 2: It's one of those objects that doesn't just point to
Speaker 2: the life that patients lived inside the asylum.
Speaker 6: But the life they had lived on the outside.
Speaker 2: I could tell from the way doctor Mack looked at
Speaker 2: this ring, the way she held it, that it was unique.
Speaker 2: It seemed personal. And then I remembered something I'd noticed
Speaker 2: when we walked in that day, a tattoo on doctor
Speaker 2: Mack's foot. May I ask about your tattoo because it
Speaker 2: says ever true it does it does, ever true to THEE,
Speaker 2: just like that ring.
Speaker 11: Yes, I'm going to try to tell the story. So
Speaker 11: that ring was found by my hust Oh, I can't
Speaker 11: do it. Hold on, sorry, Normally I'm not like this,
Speaker 11: and I can tell everybody about my tattoo. So my husband,
Speaker 11: Dustin Clark, was the crew chief of this project, and
Speaker 11: he's the one that found the gold ring that said
Speaker 11: ever true to THEE.
Speaker 3: And he was very.
Speaker 11: Proud of it, and he kept telling everyone that it
Speaker 11: was the best artifact, and everyone who thought they found
Speaker 11: something good, he said, no, no, it's not as good
Speaker 11: as the ring that I found. So, unfortunately he passed
Speaker 11: away in August. So I have a tattoo on my
Speaker 11: foot with two coffins, one for him, one for me,
Speaker 11: and a snake because he loved speakes, and a skull
Speaker 11: because that's what I do for a living. And then
Speaker 11: we've got the ring on there, and then it says
Speaker 11: ever true to thee, just like the ring that he found.
Speaker 2: And so doctor Matt continues working on the Asylum Hill site,
Speaker 2: uncovering new artifacts and new stories of the last people
Speaker 2: who touched them. There's a forward motion through the grief
Speaker 2: that seemed to be through Loan for each of the
Speaker 2: descendants we spoke with as well. Even if what you
Speaker 2: learn isn't positive, there's Catharsis in discovery.
Speaker 6: All this born out.
Speaker 2: Of a place we associate with shadows, shame and secrecy,
Speaker 2: and still this is a place that defies definition and
Speaker 2: it should.
Speaker 8: When I first started this project, and I think the
Speaker 8: goals of the CONSORTI members, the scholars who are involved
Speaker 8: from the beginning, certainly Doctor Didlake was to sort of
Speaker 8: paint a portrait of what life was like at the Asylum,
Speaker 8: and unfortunately, I think.
Speaker 3: That's very, very difficult to do.
Speaker 8: And when we try to sort of paint a portrait
Speaker 8: of what life was like, or you create a picture
Speaker 8: of what life was like at the Assida Number one.
Speaker 8: It was different from one year to the next, one
Speaker 8: decade to the next. It was different depending on your condition.
Speaker 8: I'm not naive enough to think that the black patients
Speaker 8: were treated as well as the white patients, But I
Speaker 8: also think sort of dismissing the superintendents and the people
Speaker 8: who work there because they were clearly entrenched in systemic racism. Basically,
Speaker 8: I think we if we simply ignore the stories because
Speaker 8: of that, we miss a lot of the story. So
Speaker 8: I've tried to have an open mind about possibly, I mean,
Speaker 8: were there was there anything positive about the fact that,
Speaker 8: you know, black patients were admitted there and treated there.
Speaker 8: And I think I think in some ways trying to
Speaker 8: paint these really broad strokes is less respectful to the
Speaker 8: patients than we should be.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and if there's one thing we know about Laida
Speaker 2: and the rest of the Asylum Hill Project, they're going
Speaker 2: to err on the side of respect for doctor West.
Speaker 2: Going beyond those broad brushstrokes is key. Brushing the dirt
Speaker 2: off her great uncle Hillman's story finally gave her insight
Speaker 2: to her own grandfather.
Speaker 12: I understand and appreciate myself and my family in ways
Speaker 12: that I had not before the pain of finding an
Speaker 12: ancestor not too far back in the path. This was
Speaker 12: a person who my grandfather farmed with. This was a
Speaker 12: person who helped shape my grandfather, who then shaped my mother,
Speaker 12: who then shaped me. So it's not like, you know,
Speaker 12: it's not like some obscure figure. The place itself, the
Speaker 12: asylum itself, and the taboo of mental health how we
Speaker 12: look at that in this country. All of that is
Speaker 12: I'm sure like devastating to think about, But I'm not
Speaker 12: overly disturbed by that, because you know, health issues are
Speaker 12: health issues, whether they're mental or physical. And you know,
Speaker 12: just because you know people suffer from mental health does
Speaker 12: not mean their lives are not important and phenomenal. And
Speaker 12: when I think about encountering this person through the asylum
Speaker 12: and then understanding there that there are thousands of more
Speaker 12: stories like that here, it's just, you know, it's mind.
Speaker 2: Boggling, thousands more stories all waiting to be uncovered and
Speaker 2: waiting to be found. What does it mean to find someone?
Speaker 2: Once they've been found, what done? Will they fade back
Speaker 2: into the rusted orange of the Yazoo Clay Well, Jackson
Speaker 2: makes space for them.
Speaker 6: That's next on Under Yazoo Clay Well.
Speaker 7: As soon as Jessica and I walked down the hallway
Speaker 7: and saw the sign, I just burst into tears. I
Speaker 7: really didn't expect to do that. I mean, it was
Speaker 7: just a side. So her brother said, when are you
Speaker 7: even bringing that out?
Speaker 3: And he said, I don't know.
Speaker 12: Every time I go, she gets further and further away
Speaker 12: from me.
Speaker 8: And then yeah, and then like I was saying, you
Speaker 8: can make the end sort of come to about this point.
Speaker 3: Perfect that it'll be fine.
Speaker 2: Under Yazoo Clay is executive produced by the Mississippi Museum
Speaker 2: of Art in partnership with pod People. It's hosted by
Speaker 2: me Laris and Campbell and written and produced by Rebecca
Speaker 2: Shassan and myself with help from Angela Yee and Amy Mash,
Speaker 2: with editing and sound design by Morgan Fuse and Erica
Speaker 2: Wong and thanks to Blue Dot Sessions for music. Special
Speaker 2: thanks to Betsy Bradley at the Mississippi Museum of Art,
Speaker 2: as well as Leida Gibson at the Center for Bioethics
Speaker 2: and Medical Humanities at the University of Mississippi. Medical Center,
Speaker 2: visit Jackson and Jay and Deny Stein