Two years and four months in a lunatic asylum — A Closer Reading

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In Category - Medicine

Authors: Chase, Hiram, 1801-1877 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2014 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Chase, Hiram; Mentally ill -- Care -- New York (State) -- Utica; Mentally ill, Writings of the, American Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

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Words 38,184

Reading time 167 min

Text sections 4

The source record for Two years and four months in a lunatic asylum — A Closer Reading measures this digital text at 38,184 words, 2 hr 47 min estimated reading time, and 4 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 26.8 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Chase, Hiram,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #46179

A firsthand account by Rev. Hiram Chase of his 28 months in the Utica asylum, blending personal narrative with critical observations on patient life, institutional practices, and the challenge of writing credibly about insanity.

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not be understood that the same mode of operation is practiced in all cases in sending patients to an insane or lunatic asylum. It must be understood also that we are speaking of a State institution, like the one at Utica.

Some patients are supported in that institution solely by the county to which the patient belongs; others are supported partly by the county and partly by the friends of the patient, or by the patient himself or herself, as the case may be; while others, called private patients, are supported wholly by themselves or by their friends.

When a patient is entered as _private_, it is not necessary to consult doctors, judges or jurors. Suppose it to be a wife, a husband, or a child. The patient is taken to the asylum, terms of entrance are fixed upon with the superintendent, bonds are given or money in advance as security, and the patient is received. In the most of cases the patient is not consulted in the matter. In some cases, however, the patient is consulted, and consents to go; is made to believe that the asylum is like any other infirmary or hospital, where patients are taken to be nursed and cared for, and cured if possible. In the most of cases, perhaps, there is a kind of dread and horror attending a patient taken to the asylum, and very many go against their will. This opposition is generally attributed to their insanity, and is too generally received as evidence that such an one is a fit subject for a lunatic asylum. Should this dread and fear of going to an asylum be made the criterion by which to determine the sanity or insanity of the patient, I have no doubt but more than three-fourths of the people of the State of New York would be adjudged insane.

Another mode of getting a subject into the asylum—the laws of the State having fixed this mode—is as follows: Two physicians are consulted, and if in their judgment the subject is insane, they so represent the case to the judge of the county, and he issues his order to commit this subject to the asylum, and the order is obeyed. This mode of operation covers a vast number of cases, ranging through all the different grades of what physicians may be pleased to call insanity, from acute mania down through melancholia and epilepsy to the dull, moping, driveling state of idiocy, taking, in its sweep, dotage and childishness of old age.

Here a grand field is opened for operation for designing men and women and for speculation. If the subject begins to be a care and burden to the younger portion of the family—if the subject shows some marks of eccentricity—if the patient discovers marks of dotage in the loss of memory which causes frequent questions on the same subject, and especially if a large property lies between the subject and his or her children or relatives—it is an easy matter, in such cases, and very convenient, to place such subjects in a place away from excitement and care, where they will be well used, and nursed as they could not be at home, and at the same time the family relieved of a great burden. The matter is talked up; the good of the patient is only held out to view; the real cause and reasons for this change are concealed. Doctors are consulted, and by the kind and careful representations of the friends of the patient, the doctors are easily made to believe that the subject is no longer fit to manage his or her affairs, and that ease and quiet would greatly contribute to their comfort—especially if they could be removed away and out of sight of home and their business—and so they come to the conclusion that the lunatic asylum would be the appropriate place for them; and so they all come to the conclusion that it would be best to try it for awhile at least. But to make all safe, an order would be best from the judge; then none could complain that oppression had been practiced.

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Rev. Hiram Chase opens his narrative with a revealing preface: he was urged by friends to write, yet hesitated for years, partly because he feared readers would dismiss his account as the “freaks of my insanity.” This tension—between wanting to testify and knowing that the very fact of his confinement could be used to discredit him—shapes every page. Chase is acutely aware that he is writing against a backdrop of public skepticism, especially after a female patient’s earlier memoir was met with laughter and pity. He insists that “many truths of an alarming character” are contained even in that flawed work, and he sets out to produce something more sober and credible.

A Patient’s Eye on Institutional Life

Chase describes the asylum’s physical layout with a dry, sardonic precision that undercuts any romantic notion of the place. The chapel, he notes, is on the fourth floor, “reached by three long flights of stairs,” which he found difficult due to lameness. Above it, on the fifth story, is a theater—fitted up during his first year. He claims no expertise on theatrical performances, having never attended one before his confinement, but he wryly suggests that theaters “made their escape from the lunatic asylum” and have been “running at large through the world.” This deadpan humor recurs throughout the excerpts, serving as a subtle critique of the institution’s attempts at moral therapy. He also recounts being marched to a city performance with about twenty other patients, feeling that “all eyes were turned upon us,” and admits he “looked on … mostly with my eyes shut.”

Religious Observation and Social Demographics

Chase reports that religious services were held weekly in the chapel, and that selected patients could attend city churches under escort. He catalogs the denominations present—Episcopalians, Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Roman Catholics, Quakers, Unitarians, Universalists, and Swedenborgians—and dryly observes that “no one denomination can boast that their members are never insane.” He ventures a rough social classification of the patient body, dividing society into four classes: professional men, business men, the laboring class, and a “floating unsettled class.” Though the excerpt cuts off before he completes his analysis, the attempt itself shows Chase trying to impose order on an experience that others might see only as chaos. His tone is that of a social observer, not a victim.

The Library, the Bar, and the Limits of Privilege

Among the amenities Chase lists are a library of “five or six hundred volumes,” daily and weekly papers, and the sanctioned availability of whiskey or porter. He notes that patients from other halls could borrow books. But these privileges come with a clear hierarchy: the doctor selects who may attend city church, and Chase’s own theater outing was compulsory—he “begged to be excused, but there was no use in talking.” The asylum, in his telling, is a place where even amusements are ordered. His wry comment that patients were “a privileged people” because they could drink, dance, and attend theater “all sanctioned by law” carries a bitter edge. The catalog subject “Mentally ill — Care” is thus complicated by Chase’s evidence that care and control were inseparable.

Chase’s narrative is valuable precisely because it resists easy categorization. It is neither a simple exposé nor a clinical case study, but a personal document shaped by the author’s awareness of how his testimony will be received. Readers should attend to the moments when Chase’s voice shifts—from dry humor to sharp observation to reluctant obedience—as clues to the constraints under which he wrote. The excerpts suggest a man trying to be believed, and that effort is itself part of the story.

Reading Rev. Chase’s careful account of those months in Utica, I kept thinking about how he tried to make the unbelievable feel ordinary. It reminded me of another old text, A Short Narrative of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbets, Perform'd by Mr. John Howard Surgeon at Guilford — Context and Discussion, where the author’s earnest, clinical tone somehow makes the rabbits all the more strange. Both leave you unsure which is wilder—the event, or the calm telling of it.