Kentucky's First Asylum


Book Description

Asylums were first established to care for the unfortunates of society. It was only later they acquired a negative image. In Kentucky's First Asylum, author Alma Wynelle Deese explores this issue by dissecting the inner workings of the Eastern Kentucky Asylum, Kentucky's first asylum and the second state-supported asylum to be established in the United States. She describes the people who were involved in the creation and maintenance of a medical school, law department, and lunatic asylum in Lexington, Kentucky. Using historical data, Deese presents a fictionalized narrative to explore this institution's history from 1817 to the 1990s including a chapter dedicated to 1906, a pivotal year for Eastern Kentucky Asylum. That year, four employees were charged in the murder of a patient, and this incident set the stage for the past and present history of this facility. Kentucky's First Asylum provides a historical understanding of one early asylum that became a state hospital and serves to give broader context for the understanding of the current mental health system. It provides a platform to better comprehend the problems and processes of American psychiatric care.




Kentucky’S First Asylum


Book Description

Asylums were first established to care for the unfortunates of society. It was only later they acquired a negative image. In Kentuckys First Asylum, author Alma Wynelle Deese explores this issue by dissecting the inner workings of the Eastern Kentucky Asylum, Kentuckys first asylum and the second state-supported asylum to be established in the United States. She describes the people who were involved in the creation and maintenance of a medical school, law department, and lunatic asylum in Lexington, Kentucky. Using historical data, Deese presents a fictionalized narrative to explore this institutions history from 1817 to the 1990sincluding a chapter dedicated to 1906, a pivotal year for Eastern Kentucky Asylum. That year, four employees were charged in the murder of a patient, and this incident set the stage for the past and present history of this facility. Kentuckys First Asylum provides a historical understanding of one early asylum that became a state hospital and serves to give broader context for the understanding of the current mental health system. It provides a platform to better comprehend the problems and processes of American psychiatric care.




History of Fayette County, Kentucky


Book Description

Reprint of the 1882 ed. published by O. L. Baskin, Chicago, with a newly prepared index.




The Kentucky Encyclopedia


Book Description

The Kentucky Encyclopedia's 2,000-plus entries are the work of more than five hundred writers. Their subjects reflect all areas of the commonwealth and span the time from prehistoric settlement to today's headlines, recording Kentuckians' achievements in art, architecture, business, education, politics, religion, science, and sports. Biographical sketches portray all of Kentucky's governors and U.S. senators, as well as note congressmen and state and local politicians. Kentucky's impact on the national scene is registered in the lives of such figures as Carry Nation, Henry Clay, Louis Brandeis, and Alben Barkley. The commonwealth's high range from writers Harriette Arnow and Jesse Stuart, reformers Laura Clay and Mary Breckinridge, and civil rights leaders Whitney Young, Jr., and Georgia Powers, to sports figures Muhammad Ali and Adolph Rupp and entertainers Loretta Lynn, Merle Travis, and the Everly Brothers. Entries describe each county and county seat and each community with a population above 2,500. Broad overview articles examine such topics as agriculture, segregation, transportation, literature, and folklife. Frequently misunderstood aspects of Kentucky's history and culture are clarified and popular misconceptions corrected. The facts on such subjects as mint juleps, Fort Knox, Boone's coonskin cap, the Kentucky hot brown, and Morgan's Raiders will settle many an argument. For both the researcher and the more casual reader, this collection of facts and fancies about Kentucky and Kentuckians will be an invaluable resource.







The Girls with No Names


Book Description

INSTANT INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER A beautiful tale of hope, courage, and sisterhood—inspired by the real House of Mercy and the girls confined there for daring to break the rules. Growing up in New York City in the 1910s, Luella and Effie Tildon realize that even as wealthy young women, their freedoms come with limits. But when the sisters discover a shocking secret about their father, Luella, the brazen elder sister, becomes emboldened to do as she pleases. Her rebellion comes with consequences, and one morning Luella is mysteriously gone. Effie suspects her father has sent Luella to the House of Mercy and hatches a plan to get herself committed to save her sister. But she made a miscalculation, and with no one to believe her story, Effie’s own escape seems impossible—unless she can trust an enigmatic girl named Mable. As their fates entwine, Mable and Effie must rely on their tenuous friendship to survive. Home for Unwanted Girls meets The Dollhouse in this atmospheric, heartwarming story that explores not only the historical House of Mercy, but the lives—and secrets—of the girls who stayed there. “Burdick has spun a cautionary tale of struggle and survival, love and family — and above all, the strength of the heart, no matter how broken.” — New York Times Book Review “Burdick reveals the perils of being a woman in 1913 and exposes the truths of their varying social circles.” — Chicago Tribune




Abandoned Asylums


Book Description

Abandoned Asylums takes readers on an unrestricted visual journey inside America's abandoned state hospitals, asylums, and psychiatric facilities, the institutions where countless stories and personal dramas played out behind locked doors and out of public sight. The images captured by photographer Matt Van der Velde are powerful, haunting and emotive. A sad and tragic reality that these once glorious historical institutions now sit vacant and forgotten as their futures are uncertain and threatened with the wrecking ball. Explore a private mental hospital that treated Marilyn Monroe and other celebrities seeking safe haven. Or look inside the seclusion cells at an asylum that once incarcerated the now-infamous Charles Manson. Or see the autopsy theater at a Government Hospital for the Insane that was the scene for some of America's very first lobotomy procedures. With a foreward by renowned expert Carla Yanni examining their evolution and subsequent fall from grace, accompanying writings by Matt Van der Velde detailing their respective histories, Abandoned Asylums will shine some light on the glorious, and sometimes infamous institutions that have for so long been shrouded in darkness.




Mental Institutions in America


Book Description

Mental Institutions in America: Social Policy to 1875 examines how American society responded to complex problems arising out of mental illness in the nineteenth century. All societies have had to confront sickness, disease, and dependency, and have developed their own ways of dealing with these phenomena. The mental hospital became the characteristic institution charged with the responsibility of providing care and treatment for individuals seemingly incapable of caring for themselves during protracted periods of incapacitation.The services rendered by the hospital were of benefit not merely to the afflicted individual but to the community. Such an institution embodied a series of moral imperatives by providing humane and scientific treatment of disabled individuals, many of whose families were unable to care for them at home or to pay the high costs of private institutional care. Yet the mental hospital has always been more than simply an institution that offered care and treatment for the sick and disabled. Its structure and functions have usually been linked with a variety of external economic, political, social, and intellectual forces, if only because the way in which a society handled problems of disease and dependency was partly governed by its social structure and values.The definition of disease, the criteria for institutionalization, the financial and administrative structures governing hospitals, the nature of the decision-making process, differential care and treatment of various socio-economic groups were issues that transcended strictly medical and scientific considerations. Mental Institutions in America attempts to interpret the mental hospital as a social as well as a medical institution and to illuminate the evolution of policy toward dependent groups such as the mentally ill. This classic text brilliantly studies the past in depth and on its own terms.







Medical Times


Book Description