For the Record

Case histories from the New Orleans (La.) City Insane Asylum

The New Orleans Public Library has released electronic files of several years’ records from the City Insane Asylum, dated 1882-1884 and 1888. Here on the flickering screen, stark little boxes contain the eccentricities that marked people for admission to the institution. For example:

Mrs. Mary Nelson, white, married, Irish…

This woman is very quiet in her speech and in-offensive. Her movements are slow and sluggish. She has a marked irregularity in the beatings of the heart. Her pulse is 96, but when the irregularity takes place, it scarcely beats two (2) pulsations in five (5) seconds. She complains that she has been robbed of her money, amounting to One Million of Dollars, which is in the hands of ….. [sic] and yet she is dressed in rags and dirty. Hence her commitment on the charge of Delirium of Grandeur – Her education is very poor, or more properly she has none; she is of the laboring class. Committed August 14th, 1882.

Around this time, medical and psychiatric institutions began using photography to chronicle their patients’ discontents. In the cold light of day, theories that explained deviant behavior via heredity stared back in base nitrate truth. Crime was detected in the eyebrows and in the lascivious promise of the mouth; degeneracy peered out of cavernous eyes or fixed the and thus, viewer with blatant contempt. Photography admitted them to that great chain of images reproducing the present in order to make it memorious and thus, immortal. The City Asylum’s records are a literary equivalent of these flashes of the patients’ abnormality, living moments surrounded by the recorded dust of time and number. People flutter, cry, buzz, scream, sing—a testimony as thin as wings over electric lights.

Many of the patients were rich—but not really. Convinced of phantom wealth or fugitive nobility, the mad and poor were the apes and clowns of the Gilded Age set. Living in their great communal estates, strolling on the grounds playing invisible croquet, they shouted that one day their rightful heritage would be returned to them: each one a mock Vanderbilt or a Field or a Morgan; every one a secret winner down on his luck. Mrs. Nelson suffers from ‘Delirium of Grandeur’, which also alters the heart rate. Peter Lavign “has white washed the whole place – always at work and thinks he makes a large amount of money”. Frank Arthur “says he owns a saw mill, and has the means of making hundreds of dollars a day. If any one contraries him, teases him or denies his imaginary wealth, he becomes furious, abusive & aggressive.” Mr. Arthur has been arrested many times when his vast sums were questioned, tried to kill himself even. Aside from money, “on all other subjects he is perfectly sane and rational.” The same could be said of anyone?

Not knowing English was another common reason for admission. The language of insanity is the same the world over. The staff does not need to know Cantonese. They are even able to analyze alien scripts for telltale signs of mania:

Ah Sing – Chinaman – age unknown (35? yrs) [sic] – Committed to the Asylum June 28rd*, 1882.

This man is very excited. Being a Chinaman nothing can be obtained from him. Attached is a specimen of his writing – His tongue is good. Yesterday (26th) he was very wild, Raving Mania, to-day he is much better. This improved state is probably due to exhaustion. Yesterday his P. was 108, small & weak; to-day the 27th it is small and weak at 84.

To try and tell them but only able to tell them in your own tongue, saying nothing while saying everything. Ah Sing leaves behind six sentences, the last with a subordinate clause full of numbers and weakness and dates. His name is a Hawaiian transliteration of 胡, Hú, a common last name among the island’s Chinese population (Ah Sing’s first name is lost). Hú denotes non-Han lineage, usually Central Asian, ‘tribal barbarians’. Hú also means beard, moustache, whiskers. And it can mean alley or lane (it is also forms the word Er Hu, that glorious stringed fiddle). Its adjectival form means carelessly, recklessly, wantonly. And he seems to have been just that: Ah Sing of the alleys who could not speak but tried to tell. He travelled, too. New Orleans needed a cheap slave substitute after Reconstruction and imported hundreds of Chinese from Cuba, California and the China itself. Contract work was enough to drive you mad, running after better pay no matter the cost. Or you ended up in the great laundry facilities in the city, breaking your bones and choking the heat. Maybe none of this had anything to do with our Ah Sing and he shared only exhaustion with his fellow migrants. Pulse, ‘small and weak’.

Lafcadio Hearn, journalist and alleged lover of Vodou Queen Marie Lavou, wrote of the city in 1879: “Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under a lava flood of taxes and frauds and maladministrations so that it has become only a study for archaeologists… “

Raving mania, Dypsomania, Paralytic and Melancholy Insanity, Homicidal Mania, Imbecility, Puerperal Mania, Monomania & Stupidity, Hallucinations, Incoherency. Shipwrecked souls from China, also from Ireland:

Sarah Ryan, female, white, between 35 & 40 yrs of age, native of Ireland? [sic] committed July 17, 1882.

This woman is a Raving Maniac who can give no account of herself. She is naked in her cell. The occipital bone overlaps the parietals nearly half an inch.

This woman died on the (blank) at 3 a.m. [sic]. The autopsy made nine hours after death by Dr. Archinard, A’t Coroner & myself revealed an atrophy of all the organs as well as of the muscles. The brain was not atrophied. The cerebellum was softened. There was also commencing softening of the gray substance of the convolutions of the cerebrum, especially on the left hemisphere, at its central lobe, on the external & superior surface. The pia-mater especially & the whole brain, was congested. What during life was taken for an overlaping [sic] of the occipital bone was a thickening _____* of that bone, externally at its protuberance. At its union with the parietals the cranium bones were large. The calvarium was removed and with it the greater portion of the occipital. These bones were very much congested. I have never seen healthy bones so congested. Except at the occipital protuberance, the bones are much thinner than usual, being translucent in their greater portion. The pupils were normal.

The doctors have an obsession with her brain beyond the usual skull-measuring and crank race theories. With the matter of her brain and its contours, with its hardness and softness, with the tactile qualities of its grey topography after her pan has been pried open. There is thickening, congestion, translucence… Are they describing a Turner landscape? Gushy, with patches of dryness and aridity, marshland struck with famine, substantial hemispheres. Bones have metamorphosed, areas grow and faculties diminish. Expansion, convulsion, the deformed brain as a territory to be explored. Dr. Archinard, whose name is perfect Grand Guignol, pokes around like a tomb raider. The madwoman dies naked in her cell, refusing to ‘give an account of herself.’ So Archinard writes her biological account, seeing her destiny in the cerebellum and in its dark humors. Her passions are made mere heat, her ardor extracted with the greater portion of the occipital, and all that she loved or hated fixed in those pupils whose normalcy is the only shock in a field of deficiency named Sarah Ryan, female, ward of the state, year 1882.

The world is silent and dark. A kind of color must exist for the blind, just as silence also contains motion and tone. But how to call them what they are, if you have no idea of human timbre or a bell or a screech or the color a word makes which makes it a word meaning color? Silence is full, as full as sound in its absence of sound (like negative space). There can be no vacuum. Voice of silence, color of colorlessness, thought without the intermediary of words. Without the others, there is still touch—the orphaned sense, the most powerful and most fleeting of sensations. Unlike the others, it relies on nothing. Alone, it remains in a constant present.

Theophilus Kendall, male, white, native of U.S., single, committed August 5th, 1882.

This unfortunate man is deaf, blind, and dumb. He comes from the Charity Hospital, where he has had frequent attacks of Acute Mania, and on account of these attacks, he was sent to the Asylum on a certificate from Dr. Archinard, Asst. Coroner. On Augt* 5th, 1882, 9? Sept*, 1882 recommended to be transferred to the Home of the Aged and Infirm, as he has so far shown no symptoms of Insanity – Has been very quiet since his admittance.

Mr. Kendall neither sees nor hears nor talks, so speculations on the senses do not concern him. If the deaf hear an unsound, he is also unsound of mind. If the blind perceive a black light, he cannot formulate such a contradiction. He suffers from ‘Acute mania’. Dr. Archinard is here again, and with his miraculous powers, he is able to detect symptoms in a man who can communicate nothing through ordinary channels. Mr. Kendall somehow recovers from his bout, winding up in the old folks’ home, given over to quietude like before. From one place to another, with nothing to differentiate each of them but shifts in the temperature and no way to tell if someone else is close but the static on the hairs on his arm.

Minnie Yung has been driven to madness by the fire of love:

This young girl was engaged to be married. The match was broken & made up again, but before their union could be accomplished, the young man died. Since then – 3 years – her mind has been affected, getting worst & worst [sic] daily. She imagines that she sees the young man, that he is tormenting her, at times attempts to kill her. Her movements are quick & nervous. Her look inquisitive & fugitive. She will speak rationally, and all at once, she will stop, turn her eyes in an opposite direction, and speak by signs to some imaginary being. If you call her attention to you & ask her what is the meaning of this, she seems not to understand you, she will resume her rational conversation with you, then again suddenly interrupt it to again speak by signs with her imaginary object or person. Her general health is good. Her nights often sleepless. She will cry, implore or laugh. In her rational conversations she is gay, jovial & pleasant, & yet says that “some one is tormenting me & preying on my mind”.

It does not say why she couldn’t be with her man or why he died. But the cruel irony of hard won gain and loss has called a doppelganger into being. What had once burned her with desire now followers her like a spy, arch controller of a beating network of agents of the air. What I have lost presses its lips to the glass and calls blue murder, calculating mystery in his likeness to marriage. He took me by the wrist and held me hard, then goes he to the length of all his arm. Go away from my window with your grating song. But making up her story is useless and insulting. There is no need to invent anything for Minnie Yung, white, 22 years, single, native of New Orleans, committed to the Insane Asylum on October 16th 1882, suffering from Delirium of Persecution, the result—as the record warns us, as if to explain the intensity of a devotion which will call up the unspeakable rather than say yes to a reality of stones—of unrequited love.

There are other infernos. A hundred years earlier, New Orleans burnt twice, in 1788 & 1794. Adolph Oliver, aged 21 years, suffered from Incendiary Mania and was institutionalized on Oct 26, 1882:

I am unable to ascertain the origin of his insanity. The unfortunate boy is in a state of moral & physical & intellectual degradation. He is almost blind; both corneas are almost completely opaque; blood vessels have already formed in them. When asked what caused his arrest & confinement in the parish prison, he gives different reasons, some are reasonable but generally they are stupid. One of his reasonable answers is “because I set fire, to a house. That’s the 3d house I burnt.” Why did you do this? “Because they didn’t want to give me something to eat.” Will you do this again? “Yes. No. I don’t know.” What did you do after you set the house on fire? “I went off a piece & set down and saw it burn.” Was it fine? “Yes.” & so on. His version about setting fire to houses is correct, hence his arrest.

Five days before Halloween, this nearly blind firestarter has a problem with hunger and with houses. He is young and fire is the element of the young. He is hungry. He greets the devil, probably. An old story.

Meeting a zombie:

Daniel Sawyer, black, about 35 or more years of age, single, native of U.S., recommended his commitment to Insane Asylum, he being in a state of Stupidity on October 26th/82.

This Negro is an automaton. Wherever you bring him to, or wherever his legs carry him before stopping, there he remains never speaking, never moving, never addressing anyone. If spoken to, he seems un-able to understand, and it is with the greatest difficulty that a monosyllable is obtained from him, & even then, not always a propos. He was in the City Insane Asylum, where he remained for over a year. Though he seems to have no life in him, we find his heart beating 100 times to the minute.

Why on earth would Mr. Sawyer be silent before a white man of official capacity? Does he not have anything to say, something which will make him more human to one who at least accepts three-fourths of him as human? They loathe your selective mutism more than your loud protestations. This refusal to participate in the rites of communication—which would be nothing but a confession on Mr. Sawyer’s part, that he accepts the rules of the game—means that he joins New Orleans’ living dead, those who chose non-existence over resistance. Even rebellion is healthy to a point, but what to make of someone who acquiesces to everything in the most malicious way possible? They note the strain on his heart which this monstrous silence makes. Finally, he chooses death, and with a great sovereign dignity he fuses two silences in a final act of atrocious assent:

Died at 4 p.m., autopsy made at 5 p.m. Was apparently well all day up to 4 o’clock when, after having been sitting up for several hours, he laid down on the floor as if to rest, dying without a murmur or a movement.

But the doctors cannot restrain themselves and are convinced that these bones must speak. If not the bones, then the guts. Mr. Daniel Sawyer’s soft bones cover a steely heart and freeze an iron jaw:

Cranial Cavity – Brain anaemic & indurated, seemed heavier than usual normal weight. Some adhesions of meningies to skull, and a few of Pia-Mater to Brain-Conjunctives. Yellowish – Abdominal Cavity. A portion of small bowels ecchymotic under pentoneum. Intestinal tract almost empty. Liver slate color & normal size. Gall-bladder filled with bile. Spleen slate color & small. Advanced degeneration (hob-nail) of kidneys, which are atrophied. Large amount of fat under skin of abdomen and in smentum*; this adipose tissue is of a very pale color. Thoracic Cavity – Heart and Lungs perfectly healthy. Nothing particular in other organs of body. Bones rather soft.

No, he has given up nothing. The clinical results are a mixture of decay and surprising wellbeing. Confounding them till the end and even surviving them, the ellipses of a record which meant a man who means that he always admits to nothing.

As 1882 draws to a close, an inhospitable year—

Louis Dauphin, male, colored, single, aged 23 years, native of New Orleans, La. recommended his commitment to the State Insane Asylum at Jackson, La. on December 29th, 1882, finding him suffering from Idiocy.

This man, who looks like a boy of fifteen, is sluggish in his speech and movements, and indifferent. His half sister informs us that he has never been able to make a living. A brother died in a state of idiocy, and his mother is at times demented. Heredity is the cause of his disease. His half-sister does not seem to be very intelligent.

A few idiotic words, a cry stuck in the throat, a moment of anger followed by the throbbing realization of a necessary and total passivity, time as a prehistoric sound, the host of figures waiting at the door—all of this conspires with seemingly inhuman elements, apparitions of the strength of the pack, the evidence of that cruel summer when everything was done with and decisively turned.

Solitary visions of oneself, first turned out for inspection and then turned back to face the wall. Names called out. One more for the record:

Antonio A . Guimarres is admitted on Christmas. He states flatly that he is “Governor of Louisiana, elected by a majority of 64,000 votes”. Offered as proof that he cannot possibly be a lunatic.