Let’s All Go To The Asylum

PETER: Hey there, Brian. Imagine it’s the mid-nineteenth century, and you open up a newspaper or magazine. You might just see an ad for a surprising tourist attraction.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Walk through the wards of an insane asylum and talk here and there with a patient.

MALE SPEAKER: No more interesting or profitable expedition can employ a day than a visit to the lunatic asylum.

PETER: Yes, that’s right– asylums.

JANET MIRON: Asylum tourism was a widespread and popular phenomena that attracted thousands of visitors every year.

PETER: This is Trent University historian, Janet Miron. She says this peculiar form of tourism started in the 1830s. Throughout much of the 19th century, asylums and even prisons attracted visitors from all over the US and beyond.

JANET MIRON: They came from all over the world– France, Poland, Germany, Canada, countries in South America.

PETER: Miron says asylum administrators actively courted tourists. Visitors were invited to picnic on the well-manicured gardens and take guided tours of the facilities. They might even interact with patients.

JANET MIRON: So you may have exchanged some tobacco, trinkets of jewelry in order to have a conversation with them, to hear about their history, visitors tasted their food. Some visitors requested being confined in certain contraptions that were increasingly used to restrain patients as the century progressed.

PETER: One of the most popular asylums in Utica, New York boasted more than 10,000 visitors a year. The influx was so great that one guard told a visitor–

MALE SPEAKER: We have been compelled to deny admission to the general public at any other hours than between 2:00 and 5:00 PM. We were actually overwhelmed with visitors.

PETER: Now, Miron acknowledges how distasteful the practice of asylum tourism sounds to modern ears. But she says tourists weren’t simply indulging in voyeurism. In the mid 19th century, leisure was supposed to have educational even moral purpose. And US asylums were on the cutting edge of scientific progress, or so many Americans believed. They certainly offered a stark contrast to the close, crowded, and dirty hospitals in Europe that warehoused the mentally ill.

JANET MIRON: There were superintendents who claimed that they had 100% cure rate. They would cure everyone admitted to their institution. Belief that mental illness could be cured and treated in a carefully controlled environment of an asylum, this is a new idea.

PETER: Many tourists were inspired by what they saw. One visitor considered his tour one of the most touching and beautiful spectacles we ever witnessed. And that warm fuzzy feeling extended far beyond the walls of these asylums.

JANET MIRON: These institutions didn’t exist in a bubble. They were imbued with ideals of national identity, that the United States would be a pioneer in the field of mental health care, to promote a certain idea of what American society was, and what it would become.

PETER: But Miron notes that patients probably didn’t feel so uplifted by the experience.

JANET MIRON: Likely patients viewed these interactions as sources of pain. They nevertheless often used these interactions to their own benefit. They would pickpocket visitors. They would use them to their own amusement by telling them wild stories and laughing at them behind their backs of their gullibility. They would often give them letters to pass on to family members and friends since patients’ mail out of the asylum was carefully controlled.

PETER: By the turn of the 20th century, even administrators had lost faith in asylums. They were widely seen as poorly run, their cures were ineffective, and the treatment of patients was deplorable. Asylum tourism had all but disappeared. And the purpose of tourism itself had changed.

JANET MIRON: These asylums are competing with dance halls, with amusement parks, with theaters, and tourism become something for the sake of relaxation, pleasure, getting away, recuperating. It’s not about engaging in social problems, and how best to address those social problems.

BRIAN: So as summer vacation season winds down, we’re dedicating a show to the places Americans have toured through the years. We’ll explore why thousands of visitors wanted to head to the town of Gettysburg in 1863 just a few days after the famous battle. We’ll find out why in the early 20th century Americans had to be coaxed to tour the west instead of heading to Europe for vacation. And we’ll look at the history of a mountain resort that catered to African-Americans in the Jim Crow era.