The first superintendent appointed to oversee Western Lunatic Asylum was Dr. The hospital also employed attendants, gate keepers, night watch personnel, farm hands, and a steward who handled the day-to-day financial operations. Common diagnoses included “hard study,” “religious excitement,” and “debility of the nervous system.” The asylum was overseen by a Keeper, a Matron and a visiting physician during its earliest years. Western Lunatic Asylum opened in 1828, accepting both male and female patients suffering from a variety of mental disorders. The buildings and surrounding gardens were designed to embrace the idea of “moral therapy” for mentally ill patients by providing an aesthetically pleasing and tranquil atmosphere in which patients lived comfortably, exercised and worked outdoors. The institution, which became known as Western Lunatic Asylum, was the second mental health facility built in the Commonwealth of Virginia. A Court of Directors was commissioned by the Governor to serve as the asylum’s governing body and charged with purchasing a site close to the town of Staunton, west of the Blue Ridge Mountains, on which to build an asylum to house the mentally ill of western Virginia. In January 1825 the Virginia General Assembly passed legislation providing for the construction of an asylum in the western part of the state. She lived there for 27 years, 3 months, 11 days, all the time left to her, before dying on Christmas Day, 1891, of heart disease. And she was committed to the Western State Lunatic Asylum on. I’ll never know Martha’s true story, but I do have some facts. ![]() I took this up again with some trepidation, as 19th- and 20th-century horror stories abound about warehousing incompatible wives and bothersome mothers. It’s only taken seven years, but I know more now about what happened to Martha Saul. ![]() In 1860, she was a wife and mother to five children in the 1870 census, she was found at the “Western State Lunatic Asylum” in Staunton, Virginia. ![]() The Western State Lunatic Asylum and Martha Saul is my follow-up post to a 2010 (!) Madness Monday post about my husband’s great-great grandmother. This blog highlights the importance of searching places you maybe don’t want to look at such as like asylums, prisons, workhouses, etc. Nancy Loe, blog author from the website Sassy Jane Genealogy, has shared this blog as part of our ongoing “How I Solved It Series”.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |