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Were more African Americans “cured” and discharged during this period? Or were there simply more admissions, which led to lines of thinking more in line with J.F. Miller. -RJD
“By the 1880s and 1890s another concept of degeneration circulated within medical and intellectual circles, positing that African Americans were on the verge of extinction due to their inability to physically adjust to modern society.” (80).
What circles exactly did this theory circulate through? Extinction is a very strong word, considering around 4 million were previously enslaved were freed by 1863. -RJD
1. Gonaver mentions struggles finding employees that plagued Central Lunatic Asylum; after asylums were segregated, what did the employee body for the two different types look like? Was there a stigma attached to working at the all black asylum that might have made it more difficult to find employees? - Morgan
2. In the introduction, Summers touches on an interesting notion of privacy for former patients, stating that, unless a patient's name was used publicly outside of hospital records, he would only refer to them by first name and last initial. In what ways have other scholars we've read answered the question of how much privacy one should afford patients, particularly Gonaver? - Morgan
1. The juxtaposition between D.C. being a place where the mental institutions should be the best and serve as a model for the world, while still having extremely separate institutions for African Americans is very interesting. How did it compare to other institutions across the country?-Margie Jones
2. Do we still see the effects of the thinking that people who are more “primitive” or “agrarian” are immune to mental illness? What was the initial reasoning behind this thinking?-Margie Jones
1. Towards the beginning of chapter 5 of Gonaver’s The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry Gonaver mentions how even after the passage of the 14th and 15th amendment, institutionalized Black patients were not affected since they were not legally entitled to liberties of ordinary citizens anyway. This reminded me of something Tomes mentioned in her work when she said that white men had to accommodate to the lack of rights as patients in the Pennsylvania Hospital since white men were used to never being marginalized. In what Gonaver was saying in chapter 5 is kinda like the other hand of this, where Black patients were not used to having rights anyway but did not get the immediate chance to experience these new rights after the end of the war. -Teresa
2. In Summers’ Madness in the City, it is mentioned that many slave owners had the “benevolent master” mindset and believed keeping their slaves working “relatively stress-free agrarian lives” would keep them away from mental illnesses. Despite this, Saint Elizabeths admitted African American patients starting in 1855. What do you think caused them to start admitting African American patients? What was the first case they admitted? -Teresa