74 indiana Magazine of History

Asylum on the Hill History of a Healing Landscape By Katherine Ziff Foreword by Samuel T. Gladding (Athens: Press, 2012. Pp. xiv, 220. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00.)

Asylum on the Hill provides a compre- photographs of the hospital and its hensive description of “moral treat- surroundings, Ziff reconstructs life in ment” in a late nineteenth-century the asylum. While some details might American . At the seem excessive, they make possible a end of the eighteenth century, Parisian complete picture. Descriptions of late Philippe Pinel designed traitement nineteenth-century social conditions morale to replace the harsh physical place the asylum in historical context. restraints and filthy conditions of Ziff devotes a chapter to politics with most institutions for the mentally ill. a particular emphasis on funding—a Moral treatment involved pleasant perennial issue in state institutions, surroundings, activities like sewing dependent on the degree of enthusi- and gardening, kindly treatment by asm of legislators and other officials at staff, and conversations between in- a particular time for spending money dividual patients and caregivers—the on special programs. Case histories beginnings of modern psychiatry. (omitting identifying personal data) In the nineteenth century the highlight the variety of demograph- new “insane asylums” in the United ics and diagnoses found in the asy- States, including the Athens Lunatic lum. Ziff discusses individual staff Asylum in Ohio described in the members, and especially the doctors, book (and Central Indiana Hospital nurses, and attendants who spent for the Insane in ) often individual time with patients. utilized these methods. Even the The demise of moral treatment co- buildings’ architecture was important. incided with the growing population Thomas Kirkbride, superintendent of the United States. Eventually some of the Pennsylvania Hospital for institutions housed several thousand the Insane, wrote a textbook on the patients without proportional in- subject; Athens , as creases in staffing. While the Athens the book discusses, was built on the asylum remained small, its population Kirkbride plan. doubled with time. Opened in 1874 Katherine Ziff reviewed thou- with a 542-patient capacity, it housed sands of medical and other records 644 patients within six years (p. 14). from the Athens Lunatic Asylum By 1913, the daily census averaged during the twenty years (1874–1893) 1,385 patients (p. 171). Because epi- in which it implemented moral treat- sodes of some psychiatric disorders ment. Through a large collection of remit eventually without treatment, Reviews 75

and modern research design was as ments for mental illness (exemplified yet unavailable, patients in asylums in Indiana by Dr. George Edenharter often stayed for months or years. It at Central Indiana Hospital). Asy- is impossible to evaluate whether or lum on the Hill provides a valuable not moral treatment was curative; contribution to nineteenth-century but at the very least it represented a American history and to the history welcome alternative to harsh physical of medicine. restraints and filthy conditions. Ziff summarizes the history of Lucy Jane King, Clinical Professor twentieth-century psychiatry in an of Psychiatry, Emerita, at Indiana epilogue. Kirkbride-style buildings University School of Medicine is co- gave way to smaller patient cottages author with Dr. Alan Schmetzer of early in the century. There changes ac- Dr. Edenharter’s Dream: How Science companied a new emphasis on using Improved the Humane Care of the Men- science to discover causes and treat- tally Ill in Indiana, 1896-2012 (2012).

The Thousand-Year Flood The Ohio-Mississippi Disaster of 1937 By David Welky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Pp. xiv, 355. Illustrations, notes, index. $27.50.)

A restaurant in New Albany, Indiana, Bowl. (The Great Flood of 1937: Ris- displays photographs of the down- ing Waters, Soaring Spirits [2007], by town inundated by flood waters that Louisville historian Rick Bell, was surged in from the Ohio River in likely the first book-length study of January and February 1937. That this neglected disaster.) David Welky’s thousand-year flood had a profound The Thousand-Year Flood delivers impact on people and property in the a carefully researched account of a Ohio and Lower Mississippi River Val- flood that “was not so much a lost leys. After the floodwaters retreated, disaster,” as the author explains, “as the great flood of 1937 persisted in one that has gone into hiding” (p. regional public memory—a memory xiii). In resurrecting the 1937 flood, still represented, here and there, in Welky adds important dimensions to publicly displayed historical images what we know about the history of and in high-water lines marked on flooding, the New Deal and federal buildings in riverside communities. relief, the environmental history of At the same time, the more for- the Ohio and Lower Mississippi Riv- mally told history of that gargantuan ers, the social and cultural history flood has been submerged in a larger of the people living in the valleys of story of twin national disasters— those rivers, and the aftermath of a economic depression and the Dust thousand-year flood.