Description
- Abstract:
- As one of the first state hospitals in the United States, the Worcester State Hospital (est. 1833) set a precedent for asylum design and administration that would be replicated across the country. Because the five senses were believed to provide a direct conduit into a person’s mental condition, the “curative” force of the Worcester State Hospital was thought to reside in its command over sensory experience. This dissertation examines how the institution was designed to target each of the five senses as a mode of therapy; and conversely, how that well-intentioned design materialized in the haphazard realm of institutional practice. In doing so, it seeks to reconcile the disjuncture between the benevolent promise of the asylum model and its ultimate failure in a way that captures the complex power structures and heterogeneity of actors within the institution. This dissertation applies the interdisciplinary methodology of historical archaeology to reconstruct the world of the asylum as a “sensorial assemblage.” In grounding the conceptualization and experience of mental illness in the asylum as a function of its particular sensorial dynamics, this dissertation advances anthropological approaches that foreground materiality, spatiality, affect, and embodiment as central forces in the articulation of everyday life. Historical archaeologists treat buildings and landscapes as artifacts, which function both as a material record of their use over time and as agents that actively intervene in the unfolding of events. My methodology proceeds from this conception of the asylum as both accretional and agentive in nature. Although devised for a distinct purpose – to cure insanity – once that design was given material dimensions, the Worcester State Hospital took on an agency of its own, which exerted a material and ideational force on its inhabitants, and in turn was shaped by these inhabitants’ agentive acts. In my dissertation, I target this “dialectical relationship in institutional change,” which operates foremost in the realm of everyday experience.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2020
Access Conditions
- Rights
- In Copyright
- Restrictions on Use
- Collection is open for research.
Citation
Kearin, Madeline Bourque,
"“A Refuge of Cure or of Care”: The Sensory Dimensions of Confinement at the Worcester State Hospital for the Insane"
(2020).
Anthropology Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:1129388/
