Proud Moments: Philly Once Led The Charge To Waterboard The Mentally Ill
There’s an interesting piece over at The Huffington Post today, which talks about waterboarding’s secret history as a “treatment” for the insane in the 1800s. As it turns out, much of what we know about the practice in those days centers around a Philly businessman of the day named Ebenezer Haskell (pictured), who worked in Old City and was institutionalized numerous times. Haskell came to write a book about his experiences when he was an older man, and ouch, what an experience it was:
In 1867, Ebenezer Haskell, a leading businessman in Philadelphia, was admitted for the third time to the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane. This was Haskell’s third admission because he was far from dull and he had a penchant for escaping. When he’d be out a few months, the authorities would find him, arrest him, and return him to the asylum. Meanwhile, he wrote and published with his own money a small book that described his time in the lunatic asylum and the later trial in 1868 that declared him completely sane. Small books can often have large import, and so it is with this book by Ebenezer Haskell. [...]
The spread-eagle cure, common in 1867, reveals a few things about public attitudes towards madness. The “cure” was no cure at all, simply a procedure applied to terrorize patients–especially when they were disorderly. The patient was stripped naked, thrown on the floor on his back, and then his arms and legs each gripped by one of a team of four men. The patient’s limbs were stretched out to keep him immobilized. A fifth man, a “doctor” (more often an orderly), would then stand on a chair or table at the head of the patient and pour a series of buckets of cold water on the patient’s face until the patient nearly drowned. After the treatment, the patient was returned to his dungeon supposedly “cured” of all disease, including lunacy.
Geez Louise. Haskell’s book, The Trial of Ebenezer Haskell, in Lunacy, and His Acquittal Before Judge Brewster is up online at Google Books. And it seems like it’s something else.
April 1st, 2009 at 11:38 am
Strangely enough Pennsylvania kept up the tradition of torture to it’s patients particularly gay men with “aversion therapy” way into the 1970’s. Hearings were held in the Pennsylvania House under House Leader Rep. Fineman. The offense happened at Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute, known as EPPI.