Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals Review

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(More customer reviews)I'd been looking forward to Christopher Payne's new book, as I've long had a copy of his book on the forgotten subway power substations.
His new book "Asylum" is even richer than the previous book, as it captures the mood of many of these abandoned mental hospitals. I especially like the interior shots of hallways, treatment areas and especially the behind the scenes shots of boiler rooms,work shops and storage areas.
The exterior shots of many of the hospitals built before 1900 give a glimpse of a whole other approach to the treatment of people in trouble. Many of the buildings look more like resorts and reflect a model of the hospital as a positive place to get away from the pressures of life.
Payne was blessed with access to many of these unused buildings and is further blessed with an eye that sees much and captures it on photos.

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Powerful photographs of the grand exteriors and crumbling interiors ofAmerica's abandoned state mental hospitals.

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Madness in America: Cultural and Medical Perceptions of Mental Illness Before 1914 (Cornell Studies in the History of Psychiatry) Review

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(More customer reviews)MADNESS IN AMERICA: Cultural and Medical Perceptions of Mental Illness before 1914 is a delectably readable, in depth investigation of mental illness during a time when few kind words for the clinically insane were in vogue. Psychiatry hadn't really evolved into a respectable zone of medicine until Freud and people with now well-defined disorders of the mind were grouped into madhouses and insane asylums populated by tertiary syphilitics, victims of brain tumors, and mentally retarded unfortunates. This 'untouchable' status left the population free to derive all manner of perverse etiologies from demonolgy to withcraft to religious punishment and that opened the door for not only charlatans but also for artists of every field to interpret whatever they wished. As the keenly gifted authors Lynn Gamwell and Nancy Tomes have researched and described in this lavishly illustrated tome, madness was a much maligned yet rich source of inspiration for scientists and artists alike. Extensive illustrations of the ghastly tools of the asylum doctors' trade are interwoven with beautiful and accurate renderings of the human nervous syatem and etchings, drawings and paintings by well known artists whose works were never thought to reflect madness until this volume. This book could (and most assuredly does) easily stand on its own; the fact that it accompanied an exhibition showing the drawings, instruments, and art inspired by madness during a learned physical documentary in 1995 only adds to the richness of this venture. Kudos to the authors, the publisher, and the curators for a true gift to the realm of scientifically artistic investigation.

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