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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.
Letter from Mrs. A. Schmitt to the Asylum Investigating Committee of the Citizen’s Association of Chicago, November 13, 1884
Courtesy National Library of Medicine
In this letter, Mrs. Schmitt, the wife of an engineer at the asylum, writes how the superintendent Dr. J. C. Spray threatened her family with a pistol. She wrote the letter to an investigating committee, which in 1884 looked into charges of neglect and political corruption at the Insane Asylum of Cook County, Illinois.
National Library of Medicine, 8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, MD 20894
National Institutes of Health, Health & Human Services
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