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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.

Portrait of three white girls and a white women standing together in dresses.

Asylum inmates, 54 Photographs of Inmates at an Imbecile Asylum, Joseph Parrish, 1886

Courtesy National Library of Medicine

This collection of photographs by Dr. Joseph Parrish capture, for a moment in a time, the people most affected by the asylum movement. Dr. Parrish likely took these photographs as a way to classify the people, a common practice at the time as people’s physical appearances was thought to be tied to their underlying ailments.