Sleepwalking to the Asylum

PETER ONUF: We’re Back with BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

BRIAN BALOGH: And I’m Brian Balogh. We’re talking today about the history of diagnosing mental illness in the United States.

PETER ONUF: The 1830s were a foundational time in treating the mentally ill. With the first state run asylums cropping up across the country, medical authorities had to decide who to put in them. At first, that meant the criminally insane. Prison inmates who are too dangerous to be around other, more stable prisoners.

But in an effort to keep the asylum from becoming a rug under which to sweep society’s worst, doctors began to look for other patients, more trainable patients to commit. Eric Mennel has the story of one of those patients.

ERIC MENNEL: On the night of June 24, 1833, Dr. Lemuel Belden received a message. There were concerns about the behavior of a young girl in Springfield, Massachusetts.

PORTRAYAL OF DR. LEMUEL BELDEN: I was called under the impression that she was deranged, and such at first was my own belief. She was struggling to get out of bed, complaining very much at the same time of pain in the left side of her head. Her face was flushed, the head hot, eyes closed, and her pulse much excited.

PROFESSOR BENJAMIN REISS: Jane C. Rider was a servant for a wealthy family. And she had had a fairly long history of sleep disturbances that went back into her childhood.

ERIC MENNEL: This is Benjamin Reiss, and he teaches at Emory University. And he stumbled on the Jane Rider story a few years back.

PROFESSOR BENJAMIN REISS: It was reported that she often slept too long, and that as a child she had a number of episodes of sleepwalking. And those started to get more intense as she came to work for this family.

PORTRAYAL OF DR. LEMUEL BELDEN: At first, the paroxysm

ERIC MENNEL: A paroxysm is a fit, or an attack.

PORTRAYAL OF DR. LEMUEL BELDEN: –occurred only in the night and generally soon after she went to bed. As the disease advanced, they commenced earlier. She then fell asleep in the evening sitting in her chair, or rather, passed into the state of somnambulism for her sleep, under those circumstances, was never natural.

PROFESSOR BENJAMIN REISS: So some of the things that she would do in the middle of the night would be setting the table, perfectly, for breakfast.

PORTRAYAL OF DR. LEMUEL BELDEN: Having dressed herself, she went downstairs and skimmed the milk, poured the cream into one cup and the milk into another, all without spilling a drop. She then cut the bread, placed it regularly on the plate, and divided the slices in the middle. And this with their eyes closed. She finally returned voluntarily to bed.

ERIC MENNEL: And when she’d wake up in the morning she wonder–

PROFESSOR BENJAMIN REISS: Why had somebody else done my job for me while I was sleeping?

ERIC MENNEL: Eventually, word of Jane’s behavior got around. Her sleep induced chores were written up in the local newspaper. And people wanted to see for themselves.

PROFESSOR BENJAMIN REISS: People would show up to watch this spectacle of her strange nighttime activities. And it’s not clear, exactly, how people knew when to show up, but there don’t seem to be any reports of people turning away dissatisfied. She was something of a medical curiosity.

ERIC MENNEL: It got to the point where Jane was not only doing work in her sleep, she was undoing work, work she was paid to do. Things like pulling clothes from her dresser and hiding them in places she couldn’t find when she woke.

PROFESSOR BENJAMIN REISS: And apparently after a while this became bothersome to the family that was employing her. They decided, and apparently Jane, herself, agreed–

PORTRAYAL OF DR. LEMUEL BELDEN: Arrangements were made for Jane’s removal to the hospital in Worcester–

PROFESSOR BENJAMIN REISS: The state lunatic asylum, which had only opened the year before.

PORTRAYAL OF DR. LEMUEL BELDEN: –where she could enjoy that’s a seclusion which seemed essential for her cure.

ERIC MENNEL: What’s important to note here is that just a few years prior Jane wouldn’t have been considered insane. In the 18th insanity was an entire way of being.

PROFESSOR BENJAMIN REISS: A complete delusional set of beliefs or, a kind of reversion to an almost animalistic state of behavior.

ERIC MENNEL: But by the time Jane Rider was making breakfast in bed–

PROFESSOR BENJAMIN REISS: –the concept of partial insanity took hold. And that is that you could be completely sane in most aspects of your life, but there would be one set of behaviors that could set you off, either religious delusion, or some kind of fixation, or troublesome behaviors in your sleep. So insanity started to become fractionalized, in a way.

ERIC MENNEL: A lot of this was caught up in ideas similar to phrenology, that different areas of your skull revealed different personality traits. The skull, the brain, and madness were all be broken down into their component parts in the 19th century. And with medical advances, scientists thought that if you could locate madness you could cure it. Essentially, everything must be curable, which is exactly how Jane C. Rider, a young, female servant who sleepwalked, was placed in the asylum system. A system mostly populated by the criminally insane.

PORTRAYAL OF DR. LEMUEL BELDEN: December 15, paroxysm rather singular. She is full of melancholy like a roguish child. December 19, she was more disposed to melancholy. She once said her head ached and felt strangely. She appeared very much like a person insane.

December 21, very well and wakeful all day, but in the evening had a paroxysm of complete insanity. Talked, ran about the house and refused to take her medicine. When forced to take it, she shed tears and fell into a sort of hysterical sobbing, which lasted some minutes.

ERIC MENNEL: Belden thought the problems were food related. Specifically, he blamed her restlessness on eating too much dried fruit. But even controlling Jane’s diet didn’t fix the problem. So doctors were forced to try more drastic cures.

PORTRAYAL OF DR. LEMUEL BELDEN: To warm the feet, which were always cold, the Nitro-Muriatic Acid bath was prescribed.

PROFESSOR BENJAMIN REISS: She was given everything from opium, to ether, to medications that would make her vomit.

PORTRAYAL OF DR. LEMUEL BELDEN: Her head was also shaved.

PROFESSOR BENJAMIN REISS: Leeches we’re applied. She was bled profusely. She had–

ERIC MENNEL: Leeches?

PROFESSOR BENJAMIN REISS: Leeches, yeah. She was blistered also. Pus would ooze out. There was some thought that it would draw out whatever fluids were not harmonized within her body they were causing her to behave in this way. So she went through this very painful and difficult set of treatments and experiments. And after a while, it was clear she wanted to get out of there.

PORTRAYAL OF JANE RIDER: Kind friend, as it was your wish that I should write to you respecting my health, I have a good opportunity now.

ERIC MENNEL: This is from a letter Rider wrote to Belden just before being dismissed from the asylum. And reading the letter, the words don’t seem like those of a woman who has effectively been a lab rat for the past few months. They seem more like a woman who wants to leave and will say whatever she needs do to make that happen.

PORTRAYAL OF JANE RIDER: I am very happy to say, I’m much better now. And think that being a little more unwell than usual has had a very good effect. The time has passed very quickly.

ERIC MENNEL: Do the doctors, in the end, feel like they have cured her?

PROFESSOR BENJAMIN REISS: In the final write up of the case they said that her symptoms had become much more manageable, which was, in a way, an admission that they couldn’t completely cure the problem. Now asylum superintendents at that time, they always had an out. Because they claimed that mental illness was universally curable if it was caught early in its development.

And so they often took pains, when they couldn’t cure somebody, to show that this was a disease that had been growing for years and years before it was ever brought to their attention. And the fact that Jane Rider had been experiencing bouts of sleepwalking since she was a young girl helped give them cover.

ERIC MENNEL: One thing, though, that was interesting about the story is where I can’t tell if by putting her in an asylum it’s a humanitarian effort that they want to treat her? That seems like that’s what Belden, the doctor, it seems like that’s his motivation. But simultaneously, it seems like the family, her employers are trying to just going to get her out of their hair. I mean, do you get a sense that both those things are working in confluence with each other? Or one is more powerful than the other?

PROFESSOR BENJAMIN REISS: I think both are working together, and they’re often indistinguishable from each other. The reigning idea behind the asylum movement was that all people had access to mental health, and to productive lives. And that when medical conditions prevented them from fulfilling their potential, that society had had an obligation to restore them to full capacity.

That was the PR, and often the reality was quite different, when people who were simply inconvenient to others, as Jane Rider seemed to become to her employers, found themselves incarcerated either through coercion, or through outright involuntary confinement. That tension between the humanitarian mission and the control of unruly individuals was always present through the history of the asylum.

ERIC MENNEL: And we don’t know what happened to her after she left the asylum?

PROFESSOR BENJAMIN REISS: Well, we know she went back to working as a servant. And periodically, newspaper and magazine reporters would inquire into the case and give brief accounts of how she was doing. But she slips back into the obscurity of the world of 19th century serving women.

BRIAN BALOGH: ERIC MENNEL: It’s strange to think that mental illness might have been a way out of that obscurity, even if temporarily. And it’s difficult to know what a Rider was actually thinking. After all, she wrote these letters knowing full well they would be read by the doctors treating her. Whatever the case, it was these letters and others like them that helped to give authority to the asylum movement, that helped launch a century and a half of institutionalization.

PORTRAYAL OF JANE RIDER: I feel as if I never could repay my friends for all they have done for me. Indeed I know I never can. All I can do is thank them, and deny myself everything that would be injurious to my health. I have nothing more at present to write. Your must obedient friend, Jane C. Rider.

PETER ONUF: Eric Mennel is one of our producers. Special thanks to Benjamin Reiss for helping tell the story of Jane Rider. His book about culture in 19th century asylums as called Theaters of Madness.