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In the 19th and 20th centuries, reformers in the United States and Europe built asylums in response to a range of social issues including disability - mental health, and alcoholism. These documents and images from the NLM Digital Collections bring to life the day to day experiences of people at these sites: the conditions of the asylums and the limits on liberty that many people in them experienced.
The New York State Inebriate Asylum, Harper’s Weekly, 1869
Courtesy National Library of Medicine
The New York State Inebriate Asylum in Binghamton was the first hospital to treat alcoholism as a disease. It reflected the belief at the time that removing people from their communities and placing them in asylums could fix a host of social disorders in the 19th century. Due to graft and mismanagement, the inebriate hospital closed and later became the Binghamton Asylum for the Chronic Insane.
National Library of Medicine, 8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, MD 20894
National Institutes of Health, Health & Human Services
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